KWin tiling progress

Between yesterday and today I made quite a lot of changes in kwin-tiling. Layouts now have a superclass which manages certain things. Each desktop now has its own layout. The root tile is no longer stored directly by the workspace, instead the workspace stores layouts for each desktop. For now each desktop has the Spiral layout, but it should be possible to dynamically change layouts for each desktop a few weeks down the line. Right now the plan is to fix certain layout issues ( such as spiral not understanding when a window is removed and adjusting the next one properly ).

The other major change is that cross virtual desktop moving is now supported. This was a major problem when it first arose, but once the first change was implemented, it was simply a matter of removing a tile from the old desktop and adding it to the new desktop.

There is no screenshot because none of these changes can be shown in a static image. But you can always try using the branch!

In other news I'm back in college. The third semester began yesterday, which means development time is now seriously down. I hacked on a (cool?) tool in the last two weeks, and I'll be announcing that soon. I'm also planning to add my blog to PlanetKDE.

Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Prince

I've just returned from watching the Half Blood Prince, and it was a mess. I don't know what they were playing at, but I've never seen a worse Potter movie. The linear plot is suffocating. While the movie begins with somewhat of a bang, the rest of it proceeds at some enforced speed limit, leaving no climatic or anti-climatic moments. In addition some of the key characters are missing or have such restricted roles that is it disgusting to watch ( the Dursleys, Neville Longbottom ). In addition Harry actually seems to be supporting the Ministry. The lack of Rufus Scrimgeour even prevents him from being Dumbledore's man through-and-through. Ron Weasley is made somewhat of a tag-along for the Harry-Hermione pair. It seems they were trying to put forth the idea of a Harry-Hermione pair, but that is ruined by the obvious Harry-Ginny romance throughout the movie. The only point where Ron does something is to play Quidditch.

Speaking of Quidditch, if you expected a nice match like the first three movies, you will instead be treated to the 7 Great Saves of Ronald Weasley.

Darkness is indeed rising, but that does not mean that the Order of the Phoenix do nothing while Death Eaters abound. It was somewhat of a joke to see Arthur, Tonks and Lupin running (yes!), when Harry and Ginny are trapped by the Death Eaters. But wait a minute, what is Bellatrix doing at the Burrow, and how does it just burn down. Wasn't it given the most protection by the Ministry of Magic?

It was also surprising to see the absence of the Order and Dumbledore's army at the Lightning Struck Tower ( or Dumbledore's tower as in the movie ). Meanwhile Harry stands around like some idiot while the Death Eaters and Dumbledore have a chat.

The Half Blood Prince was essentially meant to explain Voldemort's past, the story of the Gaunts, and hints to the Deathly Hallows. All of this is pushed aside and replaced by two tiny memories of the orphanage and Horace Slughorn. The ring has no mention of the Peverell coat of arms, nor physically nor in speaking.

If deviations from the book are not enough, David Yates failure to capture key moments was particularly visible. The kissing scene is just pathetic, the fear in the Wizarding world seems to be totally absent and the whole lake scene was just too lame. There is no palpable sense of magic about the cave ( quartz isn't magical you know ), nothing special in the potion ( it looks like water ) and the return to Hogwarts is far too easy. Dumbledore's death is very very underplayed. There is no dead silence, no grief in any of the characters except for a few unnatural tears.

Overall every scene seems to have some kind of half-heartedness in its execution. The only thing the movie has going for it is the comedy and some of the romance. The fixation with feet is also a bit annoying. Who the hell ties their boyfriend's shoelaces? Since the previous movie Hogwarts seems to have become just another Muggle school, with robes hardly ever being worn. I think that HBP will only do well because it is riding on the success of the earlier movies. But do not expect book fans to come out satisfied. This is the only Potter movie which doesn't leave you with a sense of magic when you get out of the theater. I don't know how it has received brilliant pre-release reviews but apparently the reviewers seem to have seen the movie as some disconnected one of a kind event, but it fails to capture Harry Potter, the story as well as the phenomenon.

The little things screw up

I had this really weird bug in kwin for half a week. When you started resizing windows, all of them would start dancing about the screen. There would be little gaps between them and so on. And I couldn't figure out why. So today I finally tried comparing ( x + width ) and ( right ) of a window. Turns out they are always off by one. So to the QRect::right() documentation:

Returns the x-coordinate of the rectangle's right edge.

Note that for historical reasons this function returns left() + width() - 1; use x() + width() to retrieve the true x-coordinate.

Argh! That ( and bottom() ) was causing the mess. What a relief.

KWin dynamic resizing and the first layout

After a short break due to various other responsibilities and a general lack of clarity in planning some of the code, I've made progress and now you can resize windows while in tiling mode and watch all the others adjust themselves to fit the screen. Admittedly there are a few kinks, and an annoying bug where the resize pointer suddenly makes the window super-tiny, but they should be fixed in two or three days. I also implemented a basic Spiral layout today which keeps halving windows and moves towards the centre in a spiral. Gradually layouts will be in the form of a plugin system, and you would be able to choose different layouts for each virtual desktop. Here is the latest screenshot. House of Cards it is.

KWin tiling ratios and orientations...

... now with minimize support.

KWin tiling has been proceeding forward at a steady rate. If you check out the latest revision, you will not only have a pretty stable experience, but will also get a design document for free.

So orientation is horizontal and vertical, and ratio is how much space the left child gets. Using these two properties I expect to be able to do most layouts. For now you can use D-BUS calls to actually use tiling pretty well.

Here are the calls

qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin slotToggleOrientation
qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin slotSetRatio <float> # between 0 and 1
qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin dumpTiles  # get a nice tree if you have debugging enabled and visible

Some applications will cause trouble. Especially some plasma widgets and Kruler aren't setting the right window attributes, so I can't exempt them from tiling. So don't launch panel settings or Kickoff menu, it won't look so well.

Minimize and restore works now, it will keep track of where the window was before you minimized it and put it back there.

Please leave feedback about bugs here or on the KWin mailing list, it will be appreciated.

Kwin : tree based tiling

In the quest to implement tiling in KWin, I've decided to use binary trees as an internal representation. This morning, I hacked on it to produce a decent prototype, just to check if the idea would work well enough, without introducing too much complexity in the code. At the moment, it does tend to crash or have repaint issues once in a while. But it works, and it does what tiling is supposed to do. Of course there is a lot to do yet. Moving and Resizing remain particularly icky because so many choices about what is good as a default, what is expected, how to implement it, will have to be made. If you are adventurous enough to try the kwin-tiling branch, do not move the windows, or basically abuse it in anyway :)

Internship and back to college

Well, my holiday has been cut short...

I'm leaving next Saturday to spend the last month and a half of my vacations in college.

I've received an internship opportunity to work as a Playtester and Beta-tester MILLEE.

I really enjoyed the short vacation though, I learnt to drive, did a lot of swimming, and hacked some decent code.

The last year (academic) has been really really unique, perhaps the most satisfying and enjoyable one. But thats for another post