Tokamak5 Logo

So, as you all should already know, Tokamak 5 (plasma developer sprint) is in progress. The main desktop-related thing I’ve been working on last two days was presenting a few chosen activity templates as if those were real.

What does this mean? That you’ll see a couple of activities in your activity bar that don’t really exist. This was done, along some other stuff, to promote the activities a bit more.

Activity template

Currently, as far as I know (as usual, I’m the backend guy and have no clue what will end up in the release for the user to see :) ) the only one /fake/ activity you’ll see is the ‘Photos activity’. It is meant for something that we all enjoy - managing our photo collections.

Before you start arguing that you don’t want to see a bunch of templates in your list of activities, this affects only the defaults - you can easily remove them like any other activity - click the red ‘x’ and you’re done.

Running applications

Apart from defining the widgets layout, templates are now able even to start applications. In the case of the ‘Photos’ activity, it will start Digikam and Gwenview.

Since the templates can be downloaded via GHNS (from kde-look and similar sites), automatic execution of apps is rather dangerous, so you’ll be asked for the confirmation on which programs to run.

You can see what it looks like in the screenshot above. Recognized desktop applications are presented with their names and icons, and are automatically selected. While other programs (like in this case ‘rm’) will have a warning icon in front and will be automatically deselected.

EDIT: I’ve just added a rather rigid test for the ‘safety’ of apps - the application is automatically selected only if it is a registered desktop application and it doesn’t have more than one argument specified. So, the things like konsole -e ‘something’ are not going to be selected by default.

As Notmart said “I have a dream!”. (I have no clue what this sentence has to do with the blog post, but I didn’t want to finish it with the usual ‘that’s all for now’ :) )