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Monday, February 28, 2011

Plasma NM: notifications

Notifications is a feature that several KDE programs use, even the old Knetworkmanager implements it. Plasma NetworkManagement did not implement it, until now. This weekend I have enabled notifications in Plasma NM. Most of the code is shared with Knetworkmanager, so I did not have to implement that much of code. I have also removed two notifications that did not make much sense since a third notification gives the same information.

Three notifications listed in networkmanagement.notifyrc have never been implemented, which also affects the old Knetworkmanager. After a few hours I finished to implement those three notifications. All notifications seem to be working, so, enjoy :-)

As requested here is a screencast of the notifications working. I added some strings to Plasma NM that have not been translated yet (my desktop is in Brazilian Portuguese), so do not worry about the missing string in the activating notification, it will appear once the string is translated. There are some minor improvements that could be done too.

OBS: I reduced my screen resolution from the original 1600x900 to 800x600 to make the fonts readable.

14 comments:

Kai Uwe said...

So does the “Wireless Network available” message work now? :)
Is there a chance of having a visual indication that you are not connected to a WiFi but there is a (free?) wifi available similar to the icon windows shows? Because otherwise you only have a “bulp” in your tray which you only figure out by accident that this is acutally the WiFi icon.

Tomasz Dudzik said...

Could you share some screenshots or screencast? :)

Anonymous said...

We want screenshots! Screencasts! Go!

Anonymous said...

You have to realize that Lamarque's time is limited, so while you're asking him to create screencasts and screenshots, that time will not be spent fixing bugs.

I don't think that's anybody's intention, but it's often how these things work...

Lamarque said...

@Kai Uwe, it should be working but I tested it here and seems not to be working. I will try to figure out why. I do not know how Windows does that. I very rarely use Windows, only when I have to. I will see what I can do. Could you please open a bug entry in bugs.kde.org about this problem?

@Sebas, well, I am unemployed at the moment, so unfortunately for me I have plenty of time :-/

Anonymous said...

@sebas you are a nigger

Lamarque said...

@Anonymous, if you did not notice, I am black and do not like such offensive words. Be more polite when talking to a friend of mine. If I were working as before sure I would not much time to work on Plasma NM. Sebas did not know I am unemployed.

To everyone else, I have just fixed the network (dis)appeared notifications. They are working now:

Fix Event::NetworkAppeared and
Event::NetworkDisappeared notifications
.

Tomasz Dudzik said...

It would be cool to make the "interfaces" section hidable. I really don't use it, but every time I open the plasmoid it uses 1/4 of my screen. Only a small popup with available networks would be just great. Same thing is that "show more" button is confusing. Btw it doesn't do anything in kde 4.6. We do have KCM for stuff like this, for more advanced options. Please let me know what you think :)

Lamarque said...

Sebas is responsible for Plasma NM graphical interface, talk to him about that. Keep in mind that at least for now the disconnect button is in Interface section, without it you could not disconnect from a network. I, for one, don't mind about its size. It is not supposed to be open all the time and most of the time I open it is to look at the interface details, so it would take space anyway.

The "Show more" button works here, it switches between "show all available networks" and "show only connected networks". I think it is handy, most of the time I do not want to see all available wireless networks.

Anonymous said...

sounds great, thanks for the work!

Tomasz Dudzik said...

As I said, this could be configurable. If you need it, you enable it, if not then you don't.

Instead of the 'show more' button, you can do:

1. change it's name to 'show all networks', 'show connected networks'
2. Repleace it with a header. On top you can put current connected networks, below all of them. :)

sebas said...

@Lamarque: sorry to hear you're unemployed, and thanks for defending me =)

As to the small graphics footprint, I'm toying around with QML right now, and that might just lead to these UI improvements. It's in research phase right now though, so nothing's been decided yet. At the least, it will make it very easy to write replacement plasmoid =)

sebas said...

@Tomasz

We're size-constrained there, so we can not just pop any text into it. (KEep in mind that the text is also translated, and something already too long in English is surely too long in some other languages (German and Russian tend to have this effect).

I would think that the meaning of the button is pretty clear, since it's in direct context of the list which is appies to. We *could* add a tooltip there, but I don't think it's really necessary.

Tomasz Dudzik said...

@Sebas take a look at this one: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/03/indicator-network-is-looking-good-in-natty/

Ain't that simply cool?