Background Stuff

Welcome everybody to "Yet another Blog Post" or maybe "Yet another KGRUBEditor Post" (YaKP doesn't sound that awful - at least I can pronounce it :-). This is just another update of what I have been working on recently, which is officially Background (TM) stuff.

To make a long story short, what I had been focusing on the last week, is improvements in the Background Settings tab of KGRUBEditor. I had to go through loads of API and source code reading (guys behind ThreadWeaver and KDirWatch, you rock) but at last I made it.

I have prepared a 22MB video (full quality link: http://rapidshare.com/files/133574001/out.ogv.html ) which shows some of the (obvious) changes in the Background Settings tab. No embedded video is provided because full quality is required in order to see all the details.

Although I don't remember all the changes I did, I provide a small "changelog" with the most changes (duh, I should *always* keep a changelog):

* KGRUBEditor got the ability to monitor folders for splash images. If a splash image is created in a monitored folder or is deleted, the splash preview widget is immediately updated. By default only /boot/grub/splashimages is monitored.
* KGRUBEditor got the ability to gain root permissions in root-owned splash folders while being in simple user "mode". Reading and writing to them won't be a problem any more, provided that you enter your password.
* When the user manually edits the splash image line edit widget or selects a splash image using the file dialog, the following happen:

1. The path is automatically turned into GRUB-compatible (GRUB doesn't understand e.g. /media/kubuntu/boot/grub/splashimages/wolf.xpm.gz - instead it should be converted to (hd0,0)/boot/grub/splashimages/wolf.xpm.gz - and this is automatically done by KGRUBEditor)
2. The splash image is from now on monitored. Other splash images in the same directory are monitored, too.

* The same apply when the user creates a new splash image from a common image file (e.g. .jpg, .png, .xpm etc).
* If an invalid file is specified, no splash image is used (you get an error message).
* Finally, the whole procedure is now threaded which means that if you have many splash images, uncompressing and creating a preview thumbnail for all of them will no longer freeze the application.

I am sure I miss a lot of things, but these must be enough information for the end-user. The good news is that the Background section works flawlessly (at least for me). It certainly has reached release quality along with everything else except for these:

• Password Assistant.
• GRUB Installation Tool
• GRUB Backup Management

Once I fix these and create a SystemSettings module I will release KGRUBEditor 0.8. Hopefully that will be in about a month.

Latest UI Changes

It seems like ages since my last post but it's merely 2 months.

The exams are hopefully finished (I went pretty well by the way) and after some short "relaxation time" I am back to developing. So, what's new?

Thanks to seele who has provided me with useful advices and above all a second UI review ( http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/1532474_yljc1/KGRUBEditorReviewJune22.odp ) I have done quite some progress. Still, lots have still to be done (mostly internal stuff, which although tiring, I enjoy them the most).

The changes are not many so a single screenshot can illustrate them all:















As you can see the toolbars and the menubar are both gone. Since the application will be turned into a SystemSettings (which cannot have toolbars or menubars) all the functionality which was previously found on the toolbars and/or the menubar has been moved onto the Tools page.

There, all the tools are categorised and layed out in groups. I am not sure if you really like it, so any feedback at all is welcome :-)