Serving the quadruped audience

Intrepid journalist Joey Sneddon over at OMG! Ubuntu! recently pointed out to us that Plasma 5 is currently not doing so well when it comes to serving an important user demographic - bored cats!

Indeed, Plasma 5.0 cost them (and us) the Bouncy Ball widget. And the reasoning mentioned in the article ([...] when trying to develop a professional experience toys and gimicks aren’t a good thing to be shipping by default [...]) is actually pretty solid I think. Hmm.

Have we lost our bounce forever? No!

But! These days we have the sexy KDE Store going on, which is a great place to put toys and gimmicks (along with neat menus).

So it's back! Behold the demo:



Bouncy Ball v2.0 on Plasma 5

You can grab it now for your Plasma 5 via Add Widgets... in your desktop menu and then Get new widgets in the Widget Explorer, or check out the Bouncy Ball store page.

Now for some additional fine print, though: I wrote this at ludicrous speed over a Friday night, and it's not well-tested. It behaves a little quirky sometimes (the goal was to match the original closely, but I didn't have a running KDE 4 to refer to). And despite the v2.0 moniker, it's still missing some of the features of the old Ball, including auto-bounce and that satisfying Boing! sound on collisions. I went with v2.0 in honor of the heritage - I'll polish it and add back the missing features a little later!

Update Bouncy Ball v2.1 is now on the store with sound support, auto-bounce, much better mouse response, a configurable simulation tick and a few bugfixes!