Features:

SuperKaramba has added many new features and has changed it's look and feel a bit. The first noticable item is the new theme dialog. This new dialog will enable people to do cool things such as install and run the latest and greatest themes posted to kdelook.org. You can also open existing themes saved on your pc using Open Local Theme.

new theme dialog

By clicking on Get New Stuff, you'll get a GHNS dialog showing the most recently updated/added SuperKaramba themes on kdelook. Simply selecting the theme you want and clicking Install will download the theme for you, unpack it if it needs, and add it to your list of selectable themes, so you can run it now or later.

Get Hot New Stuff

After you get the themes you want and they were installed, your theme dialog should update and look something like the figure below. This example looks a bit different because I've double clicked on the aero_aio theme to start it running. It is as simple as that!

1. Start SuperKaramba
2. Click Get New Stuff
3. Select a theme and click Install
4. Double click it from the theme dialog
5. The new theme is now running!

Theme dialog after updating

Another new feature is suport for .skz files. You may be asking yourself, "What are .skz files?". They are self contained themes that have meta data information and are compressed. What does this mean for the user? No more downloading and unpacking themes and searching through their subdirectories for the theme file.

This means the theme developers have an organized way to present information about themselves and their theme to SuperKaramba. This also gives us, SuperKaramba developers, some information that we can use in the future for theme management, information display, etc.

Another new feature that some people have been asking for is a revamp of the systray icon both visually and the ability to remove/hide it. Well, your call has been answered with this latest release!

Starting with this release, the SuperKaramba icon has changed. It has become one of the elements that will be a part of Plasma. This represents the changes that SuperKaramba will be taking over the course of our transition from SuperKaramba development to Plasma development.

New SuperKaramba icon

The option to hide the system tray icon was generously added by Alex Wiedenbruch. Once you have hidden the systray icon, the options that were accessible there, are then accessible in a a theme's right click menu. That way you don't lose the functionality that was provided by the systray icon.

One last major feature addition is the input box. This now gives SuperKaramba themes the ability to take keyboard input and do something really cool with it. The possibilities are really endless.

Input box

In the examples directory you'll find two new examples. One example is functional by taking input and then looking up the word you type on dict.leo.org. The other example shows how you can manipulate the colors, fonts, size, etc. All the functions should be located in the normal place, superkaramba/examples/api.html.

There were also some changes/fixes that are not visual. Cornelius Schumacher submitted a patch that enables themes that change on disk to auto reload picking up the new changes immediately. The bug where tool tips would hang around after an image it was attached was deleted is now fixed. There was a lot of communication with Matt(i.e. Liquid Weather) on fixing some things to make translations easier. You can now click on .theme and .skz files and KDE knows to launch them with SuperKaramba.

The information below is more for the theme developers so that they can make the new .skz packages.

.skz file format:

Theme Developers, here's the information you'll need in order to make themes in the new format. If this worries you, don't be. We are keeping things backward compatible with just opening a .theme file. The goal is to add cool new stuff, but not make things difficult.

To make the new package format, you'll need the zip command utility, a new file called maindata.xml, and your existing theme(i.e. .theme/.py). Below is an example of the maindata.xml file that will need to be contained in the .skz package. It provides meta data to the theme dialog.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE superkaramba_theme>
<superkaramba_theme>
  <themefile>your_theme.theme</themefile>
  <python_module>your_theme.py</python_module>
  <name>Theme Title</name>
  <icon>your_icon.png</icon>
  <description>Your Theme Description</description>
  <author>Your Name</author>
  <author_email>your_email@something.com</author_email>
  <homepage>http://www.yourhomepage.com</homepage>
  <version>5.0</version>
  <license>GPL-2</license>
</superkaramba_theme>

The top level directory will then contain a layout like this:

                your_theme/
                  your_theme.theme
                  your_theme.py
                  your_icon.png
                  maindata.xml
                

Your .skz file can be created by zipping up the contents inside that top level directory(your_theme/) like this: zip -r your_theme.skz *

Note that in the .skz package your .theme filename must be specified in the themefile attribute of maindata.xml.

After you have built your .skz package, you can then upload it to kdelook.org. The 30 most recently posted themes will be displayed in the Get New Stuff dialog from the new theme dialog.

If you still make themes in tar.gz or tar.bz2, they will still work. In fact, SuperKaramba can download that package from kdelook and unpack it into the new themes install directory: ~/.kde/share/apps/superkaramba/themes/

Bugs:

The ability to uninstall a theme from the theme dialog currenlty only applies to themes downloaded via New Stuff. The only way to remove local themes is to edit ~/.kde/share/config/superkarambarc manually.

Any bugs that you find should be reported to bugs.kde.org.

Any questions can still be asked in our forums.