KWiki 0.1 - KDE Plasmoid

Well hello there.

It’s been quite a while since I last posted here. Luckily, my friend Dragos M has been quite active and provided you with a lot of really nice eye candy.

Recently, I have entered the season of “Screw Windows OS, let’s try Linux”, and while this happens once every few years, I have to say that this time I am genuinely surprised of how much Linux has evolved. I’ve just installed Ubuntu 11.04, more because I wanted to see the new Unity interface, not necessarily because I like the Ubuntu Distro. The Unity interface is … cute, but I found it a bit to limiting for my taste. And that’s why I’ve switched to my old friend KDE. I have to say, KDE 4, is a real pleasant surprise, even for someone who has been a fan of the Window Manager for quite some time.

One of the things that I really liked was the concept of Plasmoids. I know, it’s not something terribly new, but somehow, I found myself really using them, and not just activating and deactivating them as I would usually do on other OSs.

But the real surprise came when I saw how terribly simple is to develop a new Plasmoid. And this brings us to the actual content of this post: KWiki 0.1.

The Plasmoid was created mainly because I wanted to play around with the concept, but also because all the plasmoids that I found until now, that do similar if not exactly the same thing, were scripted plasmoids, not binaries. And I wanted to see how difficult it is to create an actual binary plasmoid.

And thus, KWiki came into being.

I will not go into details of the code; I think it is pretty self-explanatory. All you have to do is fire up KDevelop 4, load the project, look over the code, and follow the instructions in the README file. Oh, and also have some cake.

I hope that this might prove of use to some of you, at least in giving you an overview on how Plasmoids work.
As usual, if you have any questions or suggestions, drop a line in the comments.

Source code: kwiki-0.1.tar.gz

As we here at DVision Design like to tweak and play with all kinds of things, here’s the latest of our experiments.

Yes, I know that there are ready made solutions available out there, some of them that are nicer, have more features and make you sandwiches, but so it was that I had to create a solution from scratch as the project that needed it didn’t allow the usage of any piece of software that comes from the outside world…Don’t ask.

So what is it?  Basically this flash movie, reads the data from an XML file, and based on what is defined there, renders a number of bars on the screen, thus creating the beautiful Bar Chart that you see below.

Amazing, eh?  Further below you will find the link to the zip file containing all you need to study, use, replicate, and improve the movie. But before you download that file in such large numbers that our server bursts to flames; let me first explain the structure of the XML file and how to properly load the Flash movie.

The XML structure is the following

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<bars>
<bar value=”” color=”” name=”” info=”” />
</bars>

Okay, so, what you have to know about the parameters:

• value – numeric and pretty much self-explanatory
• color – the bar color. The value of this attribute must be entered in the form of: 0xRRGGBB. In fact, you can use any HTML color code and just replace # with 0x.
• name – the bar name, it will be printed at the bottom of the bar.
• info – text for the info bubble. Try to keep it short, as the bubble does not auto-size…yet

Seeing that sometimes it is necessary to have more than one movie loaded on the same page, the XML file is passed as an external variable to the movie. Here’s an example:

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<param name="FlashVars" value="xmlFile=Stats.xml" />

So there you go. Now you have all the necessary information required to implement this movie or to start building your own version based on it.

And by all means, show us your variants, if you end up improving/rebuilding this movie.

Happy coding.


Download link: here

SCalc Ver. 1.0

SCalc, developed for S.C. Gima S.R.L. is a small tool for calculating the necessary materials for a constuction scaffolding of the given sizes.

The software allows the user to define different construction elements with their respective prices using an xml type file.

The calculations are made according to specific criteria and the final result is rendered into an xml file which is in turn parsed to generate the printed document that will be given to the client.

The software was developed using Visual C++ Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework.

Some more screenshots:

SCalc Document Preview

Clock Widget 0.9b

ClockWidget is a small aplication developed with Visual C++ 2005.

It features a skinnable clock, with different display types. Although it works well, it’s still a beta version, so the occasional bugs may appear from time to time.

And yes, it is freeware

Download ClockWidget 0.9b

Prerequisites:

Visual C++ 2005 Runtime. Download it from here
.NET Framework 2.0. Download it from here