Those who attended my talk about KWin Mobile at Akademy could see the new KWin effect which demonstrated that it is possible to embed web content in a KWin effect. Unfortunately nobody could see the highlight of the effect as Germany scored too early and too late. If somebody scored a goal a nice animation would have been shown. I just modified the effect to show the animation on startup to be able to record it. As always: sorry for the bad quality – recordmydesktop does not like me.
And yes the effect is called "Kicker", as it connects to kicker.de to get the current score and in remembrance to a well known panel I kept the name. The effect is quite simple and is just something like 200 lines of code and it took me only one hour (first half of match Spain vs Chile plus the half time – yes I was confident that Germany will have a match during my talk) to implement the parsing of the current score and displaying it on the screen.
Each half a minute the effect connects to the remote site and downloads the html file. Using QtWebKit and some small reverse engineering it extracts the names of the two playing teams and the current score. These strings are combined and put into an "EffectFrame" – our high level API for displaying Plasma styled textures on the screen – and shown on each screen.
The effect also caches the current score and compares it with the previous one. If it changed we know that someone scored a goal and the animation is triggered. This animation (as seen above) uses another EffectFrame, but this time an unstyled. The animation will stop after seven seconds. In that duration the texture’s opacity value is constantly increasing and decreasing, so that you have a flash event. We have a high level API for that as well: KWin::TimeLine which wrapps QTimeLine in an API tainted for the usage in KWin effects.
The code is of course useless for KWin trunk as it is a really special feature and I don’t like the QtWebKit dependency in the effect library. Nevertheless I will import the code into our test directory as it is a nice example on how to use the EffectFrame and really showing how flexible our effect library is.
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This might become a MUST-HAVE for so many people…
I correctly understand that it will be included only in KDE SC 4.6?
sorry, no you missunderstood. I will import the effect as a code example for other developers. I do not want to include it in any SC release
That means the main test for your new effect was the Millar goal? Sounds great :D.
Pretty good, hmmm with a few adjustments i think it can be ported to almost any sports website, right Martin? Hmmm… sound interesting!
Yes of course – if anyone wants to pick up on it: the source code is in SVN. I don’t have the time to make it more generic 🙁