https://agateau.com/tags/homerun/feedPosts tagged homerun2013-05-22T16:20:03+02:00Aurélien Gâteaupython-feedgenhttps://agateau.com/2012/introducing-homerunIntroducing Homerun2012-11-14T17:37:30+01:00<p>Today I am happy to present you the result of a few months of Shaun Reich and I
work: Homerun, a fullscreen launcher.</p>
<p>Quoting the <a href="http://userbase.kde.org/Homerun">homepage</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Homerun is a fullscreen launcher with content organized in tabs. A tab is
composed of several "sources". A source can provide one or more sections to a
tab. Homerun comes with a few built-in sources, but custom sources can be
written using libhomerun.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Homerun can be opened from its applet:</p>
<p><a class="reference external image-reference" href="https://agateau.com/2012/introducing-homerun/homerun-home.png"><img alt="thumb_homerun-home.png" src="https://agateau.com/2012/introducing-homerun/thumb_homerun-home.png"/></a></p>
<p>Or used as a containment:</p>
<p><a class="reference external image-reference" href="https://agateau.com/2012/introducing-homerun/homerun-containment.png"><img alt="thumb_homerun-containment.png" src="https://agateau.com/2012/introducing-homerun/thumb_homerun-containment.png"/></a></p>
<p>I also created a screencast explaining how it works:</p>
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/6WcllgzepRY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="">
</iframe>
<p><em>can't see the video? <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WcllgzepRY">click here</a></em></p>
<h2>Getting it</h2>
<p>Homerun currently requires kdelibs 4.8, 0.2.0 will likely require 4.9 or 4.10.</p>
<p>Version 0.1.0 is now available from <a href="http://download.kde.org/unstable/homerun/src/homerun-0.1.0.tar.bz2">download.kde.org</a>.</p>
<p>Git repository is on <a href="https://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/base/homerun/repository">projects.kde.org</a>.
There is also a <a href="https://launchpad.net/~blue-shell/+archive/homerun">nightly
PPA</a> for Kubuntu users.
Of courses, packages for other distributions are welcome.</p>
<p>For more information, check <a href="http://userbase.kde.org/Homerun">Homerun homepage</a>.</p>
<p><em>Update:</em> openSUSE packages are available from <a href="http://software.opensuse.org/package/homerun">software.opensuse.org</a>.</p>
<h2>What's next?</h2>
<h3>Activities</h3>
<p>Homerun could greatly benefit from integrating with KDE activity system. For
example I have a "Code" activity and a "Photo" activity, I would like to have
different favorite applications and places for each of them.</p>
<h3>More sources</h3>
<p>The more sources we get the more useful Homerun is.</p>
<p>I have a few ideas in mind, for example a world-clock source showing time in
selected timezones (we are KDE: we need more clocks!), sources for Flickr or
Picasa would be nice as well, I am pretty sure you can find interesting ideas.</p>
<p>One could even create an Amazon source... Could be handy as long as it is not on
the Home tab :)</p>
<p>You can create sources using libhomerun. Generate the API documentation by
running <code>make dox</code> and have a look at the <a href="https://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/base/homerun/repository/show/devdoc/helloworld?rev=homerun%2F0.1">helloworld example
source</a>.</p>2012-11-14T17:37:30+01:00https://agateau.com/2012/akademy-fr-2012Akademy-fr 20122012-11-26T17:40:05+01:00<p>This weekend was the second edition of Akademy-fr, a French KDE event organized by
<a href="http://www.toulibre.org">Toulibre</a>, and co-hosted in Toulouse as part of <a href="http://www.capitoledulibre.org/2012">Capitole du
Libre 2012</a>.</p>
<h2>Saturday</h2>
<p>Just like last year, Akademy-fr 2012 was a two-day event. On Saturday we held a
KDE booth and gave talks. I didn't give any talk this year, though, instead I spent most
of my time on the KDE booth.</p>
<p>Our booth was equipped with two laptops running latest release of KDE SC as well
as two Weetab tablets running Plasma Active. Thanks to the hard work of Kévin
Ottens we had a nice set of demo materials on all machines: videos, music,
pictures and other documents as well as real-world-like KDE activities.</p>
<p>Tablets really are visitor magnets: if you have tablets on a booth you want to
put them in front to attract people. Our demo scenario usual went like this:
catch the attention of someone with our tablets, then demo the way Plasma Active works
and introduce them to the concept of activities. After this, transition to the
laptops, explain the activity concept exists on laptops as well, and continue
with a demo of KDE there.</p>
<p>On the merchandising front, we didn't try to sell anything as there was already
a <a href="http://freewear.org">Freewear</a> booth selling KDE T-shirts, mugs, cushion and
other goodies. Having nothing to sell saved us from having to handle cash.
Instead we gave away KDE stickers and buttons. Thanks to Kévin Kin-Foo and
<a href="http://pixcyl.free.fr/">PixCyl</a> we also had a nicely done KDE leaflet in French and A3-sized KDE Akademy-fr
posters.</p>
<p><a class="reference external image-reference" href="https://agateau.com/2012/akademy-fr-2012/leaflet.jpg"><img alt="thumb_leaflet.jpg" src="https://agateau.com/2012/akademy-fr-2012/thumb_leaflet.jpg"/></a></p>
<p><em>KDE leaflets. Top-left: a stack of them. Top-right: content. Bottom-right: additional page inserted inside</em></p>
<p>Before flying to Toulouse I printed two A2-sized posters: a big K logo and a
poster intended to recruit testers. As you can see it took me a few attempts to
get proper prints :)</p>
<p><a class="reference external image-reference" href="https://agateau.com/2012/akademy-fr-2012/preparing-a2-posters.jpg"><img alt="thumb_preparing-a2-posters.jpg" src="https://agateau.com/2012/akademy-fr-2012/thumb_preparing-a2-posters.jpg"/></a></p>
<p>I was quite happy with the way the recruiting poster ended up, but unfortunately
didn't get any success on the tester recruiting front :(.</p>
<p><em>(The SVG document for the recruiting poster is available <a href="https://agateau.com/2012/akademy-fr-2012/kde-qa.svg">from here</a>,
should you be interested in re-using it. French texts should be easy to change.
Note that this mostly not my work, I started from a <a href="http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/KDE+SVG+-+Konqui?content=19173">Konqi wallpaper from
Pilaf</a>,
removed the background, slightly adjusted the eye direction, created the "wall"
and drew the pointing hand)</em></p>
<p>At the end of the day we had a nice chat with David Revoy, who gave a great
presentation about Krita. David is an artist who now creates all his artwork
with Krita, MyPaint and GIMP. He worked, among other projects, on
<a href="http://sintel.org">Sintel</a> and <a href="http://tearsofsteel.org">Tears of Steel</a>, the
latest movies from the Blender Foundation. This was really inspiring, you may
want to visit <a href="http://www.davidrevoy.com">his website</a>.</p>
<h2>Sunday</h2>
<p>Sunday was a workshop day. David Faure and Kévin Ottens ran a KDE Frameworks 5
workshop, Sébastien Renard ran a translation quality workshop, I ran a "UI
Clinic" workshop.</p>
<p>My clinic was not overcrowded: I had only one patient. Jean-Nicolas Artaud came
to discuss Calligra Stage. Together we came up with a good set of changes to
improve slide thumbnails as well as many of Stage toolboxes. Some of those
changes should also benefit other Calligra applications as well, which is nice.</p>
<h2>After-thoughts</h2>
<p>I had a great time at Toulouse and I am looking forward to the 2013 edition. I
am also very happy about the demo data files Kévin put together. This is
something we always thought of creating after each Solutions Linux exhibition,
but never actually did.</p>
<p>We were discussing the best way to share them: the whole set is quite big
(2.3GB). There is a already a <a href="https://projects.kde.org/projects/others/kde-promo/repository">git repository for KDE Promo
Material</a> but a
git repository is a bit impractical in my opinion: Storing big data files for all languages in one
git repository means one has to get all languages when cloning the repository.</p>
<p>I think the solutions are either to use Subversion (which allows for partial
checkouts) or to setup separate git repositories per language|country. I see the
Brazil team already has a separate repository, so maybe we should follow them
and create a French repository. Subversion would however have the advantage of
being able to checkout only parts of the repository using non-recursive
checkouts, which could be handy when you are trapped with booth-quality
internet access and want to download a few files.</p>
<p>I also thought a bit about this "UI Clinic" idea. I was actually lucky only one
person show up: we ended up spending two hours on Stage, and could probably have
spent more if lunch and having to fly back home had not interfered. This is
similar to what happened in the UI Clinic BoF at Berlin Desktop Summit: I spend
3 hours on two applications, luckily Nuno was also there to help and worked on
other applications. This organization simply does not scale.</p>
<p>I would like to try something different for next Akademy: recruit some "UI
doctors" early, contact application developers before Akademy and see if they
are interested in discussing UI improvements for their applications, have the
"UI doctors" study applications before the event and schedule individual 1 or 2
hour sessions, one for each application. This should be more efficient.</p>2012-11-26T17:40:05+01:00https://agateau.com/2012/homerun-0.1.1Homerun 0.1.12012-12-19T17:33:21+01:00<p>So while everybody is busy celebrating the release of <a href="http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2012/12/19/qt-5-0/">Qt 5</a>
(Congratulations!) Let me announce a much more modest release: <a href="http://userbase.kde.org/Homerun">Homerun</a> 0.1.1.</p>
<p>This new version comes with one new feature: the ability to change the launcher
icon, and a few fixes:</p>
<ul>
<li>Fix "halt" action performing "log out" instead</li>
<li>Fix memory leak when browsing folders</li>
<li>Fix rootUrl appearing in PathModel if it did not end with a slash</li>
<li>Fix crash when trying to add a tab to an empty model</li>
<li>Fix crash if user tries to configure tabs while not on start page</li>
<li>Fix category and website fields in desktop files</li>
</ul>
<p>You can download the source from <a href="http://download.kde.org/unstable/homerun/src/homerun-0.1.1.tar.bz2.mirrorlist">download.kde.org</a>. Packages
should get updated soon.</p>2012-12-19T17:33:21+01:00https://agateau.com/2013/homerun-0.2.1-releasedHomerun 0.2.1 released2013-02-27T17:47:41+01:00<p>Was about to blog about the 0.2.0 release yesterday, but some bugs sneaked in at
the last minute, so here comes Homerun 0.2.1. Here is an overview of the main
changes.</p>
<h2>"Single runner query mode" support</h2>
<p>Homerun 0.1.x can show results from KRunner runners through the Runner source,
which lets you combine a set of runners and query them for results.</p>
<p>A little-known feature of KRunner runners is the "Single runner query mode".
This feature means Homerun can take advantage of these special runners to
display a list of items without requiring the user to search for something.</p>
<p>This makes it possible, for example, to add the Activity runner to your Home tab
and switch between running activities, or to add the Kate or KDevelop session
runners and get a quick list of available sessions.</p>
<p><img alt="Activity and KDevelop session runners" src="https://agateau.com/2013/homerun-0.2.1-released/activity-kdevelop.png"/></p>
<p>In Homerun 0.2.1, these runners are directly listed as Homerun sources in edit
mode, making it easy to add them to your tabs.</p>
<p>This is still experimental though: one important limitation right now is that
there is no way for such sources to refresh themselves. This means that your
list of activities is not going to update itself as you start or stop
activities. It also means the "Recent documents" runner is not yet a suitable
replacement for the "Recent documents" source since it cannot refresh itself :/</p>
<h2>Multiple actions per item</h2>
<p>Homerun sources now have the ability to expose additional actions for each item.</p>
<p>The other actions are accessible through a context menu, which can be triggered
by:</p>
<ul>
<li>Left-clicking the arrow in the top-right corner of the item</li>
<li>Long-clicking the item</li>
<li>Right-clicking the item</li>
<li>Pressing M or the "Menu" key</li>
</ul>
<p>File-oriented sources like the "Dir", "Recent Documents" and "Favorite Places"
sources take advantage of this by showing relevant "Open With" actions and a
"Properties" action. This makes it possible to open a file with another
application or to open a folder with Dolphin instead of browsing it within
Homerun.</p>
<p>The "Recent Documents" source also adds an action to let you remove an item from
the list.</p>
<p>Actions exposed by runners are also displayed in this context menu.</p>
<p>Note that favorite handling has also been moved to this menu, making it more
unlikely to remove a favorite place by mistake.</p>
<p><img alt="Showing the context menu from the "Favorite Places" source" src="https://agateau.com/2013/homerun-0.2.1-released/extra-actions.png"/></p>
<h2>Improved Power tab</h2>
<p>The Power tab received a few improvements:</p>
<ul>
<li>Unavailable sleep modes are not listed anymore.</li>
<li>Opened sessions are now directly listed below the session items, making it
fast and easy to switch between opened sessions.</li>
</ul>
<p><img alt="Opened Session source in action" src="https://agateau.com/2013/homerun-0.2.1-released/opened-sessions.png"/></p>
<h2>Visual changes</h2>
<p>Homerun is a fullscreen launcher, it is now even more fullscreen: the borders
around the screen has been removed, reducing clutter a bit.</p>
<p>Header titles are now aligned to the left of the screen, they look less odd on
tabs which do not have many items, such as the Power tab.</p>
<p>In containment mode, a shadow is now shown behind the text. This
improves the readability of text over highly-constrasted wallpapers.</p>
<p><a href="https://agateau.com/2013/homerun-0.2.1-released/containment.png"><img alt="Homerun running as a containment" src="https://agateau.com/2013/homerun-0.2.1-released/thumb_containment.png"/></a></p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>That's it for this version. You can get it from <a href="http://download.kde.org/unstable/homerun/src/homerun-0.2.1.tar.bz2">download.kde.org</a>. Note that
this new version requires KDE SC 4.10.</p>2013-02-27T17:47:41+01:00https://agateau.com/2013/homerun-0.2.2-is-outHomerun 0.2.2 is out2013-04-23T00:20:11+02:00<p>Just a quick note to let you know version 0.2.2 of <a href="http://userbase.kde.org/Homerun">Homerun</a> has been released.</p>
<p>This new version includes one often requested bug fix: the ability for the "Installed Apps" and "All Installed Apps" to refresh themselves when new applications are installed or uninstalled. Homerun 0.2.2 also ships with translations which have not been released in previous versions because of some mix up with release scripts :/ (It turns out if your application is not released as part of KDE SC, you should use <a href="https://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/sdk/releaseme">releaseme</a>, not <a href="https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdesdk/kde-dev-scripts/repository/revisions/master/show/createtarball">createtarball</a>)</p>
<p>You can get the new tarball from here: <a href="http://download.kde.org/unstable/homerun/src/homerun-0.2.2.tar.bz2">homerun-0.2.2.tar.bz2</a>, this version comes with:</p>
<ul>
<li>8 complete translations: da, fi, lt, nl, pt, pt_BR, sv and uk</li>
<li>3 mostly complete ones (> 80%): es, ru, tr</li>
<li>a bunch of other less complete ones</li>
</ul>
<p>We plan a 0.2.3 release two weeks from now which should come with more complete translation coverage.</p>2013-04-23T00:20:11+02:00https://agateau.com/2013/homerun-0.2.3Homerun 0.2.32013-05-07T14:32:09+02:00<p>As <a href="https://agateau.com/2013/04/23/homerun-0.2.2-is-out/">announced</a> two weeks ago, here is another release of
<a href="http://userbase.kde.org/Homerun">Homerun</a>.</p>
<p>This new release comes with many more translations (16 complete translations,
and 4 more than 80% complete). It also includes some fixes:</p>
<ul>
<li>The "Alt-Up" shortcut key to go up one level when navigating is back</li>
<li>The "Power" source no longer uses internal DBus APIs, making it work again with upcoming KDE SC 4.11 (Thanks to Hrvoje Senjan for this fix)</li>
</ul>
<p><a class="reference external image-reference" href="https://agateau.com/2013/homerun-0.2.3/screenshot.png"><img alt="thumb_screenshot.png" src="https://agateau.com/2013/homerun-0.2.3/thumb_screenshot.png"/></a></p>
<p>That's about it. As usual, you can get the tarball from <a href="http://download.kde.org/unstable/homerun/src/">download.kde.org</a>.</p>2013-05-07T14:32:09+02:00https://agateau.com/2013/homerun-1.0.0Homerun 1.0.0!2013-05-22T16:20:03+02:00<h2>A New Release</h2>
<p>Today, I am happy to announce the release of <a href="http://userbase.kde.org/Homerun">Homerun</a> 1.0.0. This new version
comes with a few new features.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This short video demonstrates how it works:</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/iE1sSaVw9pg?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="">
</iframe>
<p>This was surprisingly difficult to get right with QtQuick 1, so I am glad it's now
done.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><a class="reference external image-reference" href="https://agateau.com/2013/homerun-1.0.0/shortcuts.png"><img alt="The shortcut dialog" src="https://agateau.com/2013/homerun-1.0.0/thumb_shortcuts.png"/></a></p>
<p>Finally, other minor improvements have been made:</p>
<ul>
<li>The context menu of the "Trash" folder now has an "Empty Trash" entry,</li>
<li>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.</li>
</ul>
<p>As usual, this new release is available on <a href="http://download.kde.org/stable/homerun/src/homerun-1.0.0.tar.bz2.mirrorlist">download.kde.org</a>.</p>
<h2>Moving On</h2>
<p>This release is my last Homerun release: I am passing over maintenance
to Eike Hein, who you may know as the man behind <a href="http://konversation.kde.org/">Konversation</a> and
<a href="http://extragear.kde.org/apps/yakuake/">Yakuake</a>. I am confident Homerun is in good hands with him.</p>
<p>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.</p>2013-05-22T16:20:03+02:00