My contribution to Plasma 5.5

In this post, I'd like to quickly present everything I've been working on for the upcoming Plasma 5.5.

Quicklaunch applet is back
One applet I missed the most from KDE4 Plasma times was Quicklaunch applet. I use vertical panel and adding multiple launchers to vertical panel is not really convenient because they are placed bellow each other, and in result occupy a lot of vertical space. That's why I was using Quicklaunch that let's you have (in my case) 4 applets that occupy the same space as one big launcher.

For Plasma 5.5, I have reimplemented the old Quicklaunch in QML. It offers all features that the old applet had, except auto-columns/rows functionality, so you now need to manually specify the number you prefer to have. I had some issues implementing it, so I just decided to remove this functionality. I hope it won't be missed :)

If you can't wait and want to try it right now, you can build it yourself from scratch/drosca/quicklaunch-qml.git. It works with Plasma 5.4 and probably also with older versions.

Quicklaunch in vertical panel and on desktop

New Bluetooth Devices KCM
In Bluedevil, apart from some fixes, I've been working on new Bluetooth Devices KCM. It now shows devices from all Bluetooth adapters, looks better and also is able to setup DUN/PAN network for devices that supports it.

Bluetooth Devices KCM

There are bug reports about Bluedevil not being usable in Plasma 5, not starting automatically etc. on Kubuntu. This is because Kubuntu is still using old BlueZ 4 with very old KDE4 Bluedevil. Fortunately, this will all be fixed in Kubuntu 15.10 that finally switched to BlueZ 5 and is going to be released soon.
This is also a remainder not to report bugs for these old Bluedevil versions. They are no longer maintained, so your bug reports will simply be closed.

Keyboard layouts
I've been also trying to fix some keyboard layouts bugs, including sometimes forgetting the layouts setup in settings. From my investigation, it seems that the main issue is that the code that listens for device hotplug events only works on systems with xcb-xinput (not available in Debian and other distros), so my idea is to use udev when xcb-xinput is not available. It is still in review, but it should be ready in time for Plasma 5.5.

Bluedevil 2.1.1 released

I am happy to announce a new Bluedevil release.

This is mainly a bugfix release with two minor new features. The first one is a new page in a pairing wizard. Instead of closing the wizard when it finishes, a success page is now shown to the user to indicate device setup was completed.
The other addition is a new warning message in KCM. Instead of "No Bluetooth adapters have been found." you will now see "Your Bluetooth adapter is powered off." when you actually have a Bluetooth adapter, but it is powered off.

This is also a last release of kdelibs4 Bluedevil.

What's next?
Bluedevil is now released as part of Plasma 5.
If everything goes by the plan, there will be bigger changes for Plasma 5.3 release. Bluedevil will use a new BluezQt library instead of libbluedevil. As BluezQt offers a QML API, I have also been working on a new Bluetooth plasmoid. The plasmoid's code is based on a network management plasmoid. It will probably need some new icons, but otherwise I think it looks quite good.

Here are some screenshots:

Expanded device details with action buttons

Connected devices are displayed in own section

Bugs fixed in 2.1.1:

• don't try to infinitely kill monolithic when it fails #343682
• fix directly opening files from obexftp (eg. images in gwenview)
• fix one crash in kded module #342581
• fix obexftp browse files on old S60 devices #342259

Download:
bluedevil: bluedevil-2.1.1.tar.xz

Bluedevil 2.1 released

I am happy to announce that new version of Bluedevil is out!

On 3rd December, I have released Bluedevil 2.0. It was a first stable release that supported Bluez 5 and it contained mainly crash fixes over 2.0-rc1. Unfortunately, there was also a big regression.
Libbluedevil was automatically enabling (power on) all adapters that have been found. However, this behavior was causing issues that even if the user disabled Bluetooth, it was enabled again after reboot. So the libbluedevil was adjusted not to automatically change powered state of any adapters. The problem is that Bluez is not enabling adapters at startup, so as a result, Bluetooth was now always disabled on startup.

In the new 2.1 release, powered state of all adapters is saved and restored in Bluedevil daemon. Another change is that the alias of adapter will be used in every place where name of adapter is displayed. It was always possible to change alias of adapter in KCM, but it wasn't actually used anywhere.

There is also one small improvement in kio_obexftp. It will show icons of storage types in root folder of obexftp filesystem. It should work correctly with Nokia (S40, Symbian) and Android (KitKat, Lollipop) devices. If you find any issue with the icons, please let me know.

Storage icons on Android phone

Bugs fixed in 2.1:

• remember powered state of all adapters #337193
• monolithic (Bluetooth icon) will now be correctly hidden in system tray when all adapters are powered off #341768
• monolithic will now be removed from system tray when there are no adapters
• action to send files over Bluetooth will now be shown only for file that can actually be sent (only local files)
• PIN in pairing wizard will now be accepted only after clicking "Matches" button
• kio_obexftp should now better handle errors and correctly reconnect after losing connection #321560
• kio_bluetooth will not crash when trying to access invalid device

Download:
bluedevil: bluedevil-2.1.tar.xz
libbluedevil: libbluedevil-2.1.tar.xz