Aurélien Gâteau

Homerun 1.0.0!

written on Wednesday, May 22, 2013

A New Release

Today, I am happy to announce the release of Homerun 1.0.0. This new version comes with a few new features.

Let's start with the biggest one: favorite reordering by drag and drop. This is one of the most wanted feature requests for Homerun. It lets you reorder your favorite applications and places by holding down the left mouse button and dragging items around.

This short video demonstrates how it works:

This was surprisingly difficult to get right with QtQuick 1, so I am glad it's now done.

Note that while this feature is currently only available for the "Favorite Applications" and "Favorite Places" Homerun sources, it is actually possible for any source to provide reordering via drag and drop if it makes sense for this source to do so.

Another new feature is the ability to customize shortcuts. This started with the idea of creating a cheatsheet of Homerun shortcuts, but I was worried the list in the cheatsheet would not be kept up to date with the actual shortcuts so I looked into generating the content of the cheatsheet from the code handling the shortcuts. At one point I realized kdelibs already provided what I wanted and more in the form of the standard shortcut dialog, so I scraped my code and went for exposing the standard KDE shortcut dialog. You can reach it from the configure menu in the top-right of the screen.

The shortcut dialog

Finally, other minor improvements have been made:

  • The context menu of the "Trash" folder now has an "Empty Trash" entry,
  • When an application or place is marked as a favorite, a short message appears on the top of the screen, reassuring you that your request has been taken into account.

As usual, this new release is available on download.kde.org.

Moving On

This release is my last Homerun release: I am passing over maintenance to Eike Hein, who you may know as the man behind Konversation and Yakuake. I am confident Homerun is in good hands with him.

As for me, I am going to return to what I enjoy most: working on applications. In the next months I plan to get more involved in KDEPIM, starting with what I do best: obsessing beyond reason about widgets layouts and margins. Once I feel familiar enough with the code base, I'll try to get a bit out of my comfort zone and help fixing underlying bugs.

This post was tagged homerun and kde