2019 Plasma and Usability & Productivity sprint

-  Nicolas Fella

From 19.6. to 25.6. I attended this year’s combined Plasma and Usability & Productivity sprint in the beautiful city of Valencia.

It was a great opportunity to meet old and new friends, drink beer and sangria on the rooftop and of course do some hacking.

First we discussed about the future development of Plasma, especially the Wayland experience. I was particularly interested in how we can solve the two missing pieces in KDE Connect on Wayland, Keyboard input and clipboard synchronization.

We did not only discuss things but got our hands dirty as well tough. I took the opportunity to work on several components, most of which I haven’t worked on much before:

• I’ve reworked the system tray settings to be more concise and usable. Furthermore I worked on hiding certain system tray elements when they are not in a useful state, making the system tray less cluttered. I also fixed the appearance of the disk quota icon in the system tray settings and the system tray itself when using a dark theme.
• After I cleaned the code and polished the export menu I worked on integrating an image annotator in Spectacle. Kudos to Damir Porobic for doing the hard part of it by providing kImageAnnotator.
• I implemented a more human friendly sort order description in Dolphin.
• I improved the user experience of Purpose, the framework used for sharing stuff. Cancelling a share doesn’t show an error any more. The share dialogs for KDE Connect and bluetooth got a huge makeover. The share menu now shows ellipsis where semantically appropriate.
• Next to polishing the menus I implemented sharing via Purpose in Gwenview.

The sprint was generously hosted by Slimbook. Thank you very much for that!

Sprints like this are only possible due to the donations KDE e.V. is getting. Please consider donating if you want us to be able to further improve our software.