Plasma Awesomeness Wallpaper

So after I used my ub3r 1337 haxX0rz skillz to code eyecandy that will make everybody’s Plasma crash even if they aren’t using it, I decided to code something a tad bit more important.

I plan to make this code available to the masses infect all of y’all’s computers soon, but here’s a screenshot:

It basically detects whether a Democrat or Republican is in office, and displays that wallpaper even if a Democrat isn’t if office. It displays that picture all the time, because that’s just how I roll. This will become the default wallpaper plugin for KDE 4.3, and for every KDE 4.x release that Obama’s in office. (Which will probably be forever)

Actually to tell you the truth, I’m a just bit late with April fools. (Plus I don’t really care much for either Republicans or Democrats to tell you the truth :P) I wish my President, President Obama, the best and hope he does the job to the best of his abilities. Let’s leave any political discussion at that, though. I really don’t want to have to deal with political comments. The above was done purely as a lighthearted joke, and any comments that go beyond “Ha ha!” will probably get deleted.

Real stuffs!

Today I was busy making real-life improvements to the weather wallpaper plugin, explaining the lateness of my prank. The wallpaper plugin now uses image painting code more similar to that of the default “Image” wallpaper plugin that most everybody uses. That means that it will autodetect what resolution you have and try to find the best wallpaper for your resolution, where available. Otherwise it will scale the closest wallpaper found to your screen res. This means no more tiled wallpaper. 🙂

It also now handles all (as far as I know of) weather conditions that the weather dataengine can throw at it, aside from prediction icons which would be useless in our case. That is not to say that each weather situation has a unique wallpaper. =P

I still need good “free as in software” wallpapers for: storm, hail and a clear night, preferably in a high resolution that I can scale down into smaller resolutions. Any suggestions would be very welcome.

The quirks and limitations list is dropping, and I think that I could make a “stable release” to kde-look or somesuch soon. Remaining issues include:

– The dataengine for the first location doesn’t seem to go away after setting a second, new location, so changing the location won’t work unless you change to another plugin and change back or restart plasma
– The initial “you need to configure this wallpaper” wallpaper is gone now, and I plan on adding a configure button later once I figure out exactly how…
– NOAA still don’t work, and I don’t see it working until I figure out a different way of getting the weather from the dataengine. I hear the LCD weather station has some nice code, though…

So the list is growing smaller! That’s good news. 🙂 The instructions from last time still apply, but note that you will need the wallpapers from kdebase-workspace and kdeartwork now, or else you’ll be seeing a plain blue background for some weather conditions.