GSOC Rekonq – A Screenshot
As some of you may know, I am working to implement tab grouping in Rekonq using a Panorama view. After so many days of not blogging, I thought I should post an update. I have a screenshot to show. Not very attractive though, looks very very blank, but its still something. At this stage, Rekonq just shows the sessions and thumbnails of the tab – including the deactivated ones. I haven’t been able to find a nice way to show the deactivated sessions – i know it looks clumsy 🙂 Right now I am working on beautifying the UI, using QGraphicsView for it. Any cool UI ideas are welcome. Here’s the screenshot
And here’s how the session file for the same is stored internally
<!DOCTYPE sessionFile>
<sessionFile>
<session title="" active="true">
<tab title="Maths 'N' Tech Club | NIT Durgapur" url="http://localhost/mntc/"/>
<tab title="Fedora Project Homepage" url="http://fedoraproject.org/"/>
<tab title="Downloads" current="true" url="about:downloads"/>
<tab title="Test Page for the Apache HTTP Server on Fedora" url="http://localhost/"/>
</session>
<session title="" current="true">
<tab title="Twitter / Home" url="http://twitter.com/"/>
<tab title="Bookmarks" current="true" url="about:bookmarks"/>
</session>
<session title="" active="true">
<tab title="Planet KDE" current="true" url="http://planetkde.org/"/>
</session>
</sessionFile>
Do send in your awesome ideas/criticism that might help me improve 🙂
Walk With Wyuka 
It would be good if you could close Tabs from that overview.
Of course it will be possible. You can drag drop tabs between session, close them, add them, and more. This is just a screenshot of what I’ve achieved so far. But a lot more is coming 🙂
Is it impossible to use the Qt background (or whatever it’s called) for perfect consistency with the rest of the window? Both oxygen-transparent and background pixmaps can make the windows themselves truly beatiful.
dead sessions in gray-scale, should look good, and live colorful
Yeah that’s what I have in mind. But we cannot have two QGraphicsEffects on the same QGraphicsItem, that’s the problem. So currently if I enable the colorize effect, i need to do away with the dropshadow for the dead session. Probably i need to write my own effect that’s a combo of the two. Thanks for the advice.
bigger tab preview!!!!
thats all.
This is so ridiculously awesome I can’t describe. Though will it be usable in konqueror as well or is it going to be too directly tied to rekonq in the code?
Is this using the Plasma KPart ? Or is this a all brand new QGraphicsView stuff ?
No this does not use Plasma KPart. The effects are hand-coded using QGraphicView and the awesome QPainter.
Hi, can I also ask what is your task bar?
You mean my panel? Its the default panel, just increased in height 🙂
Also, since there are lots of windows, so just the icons are shown.
Does it differ form Firefox’s panorama? In Firefox there is no sessions – all tabs are lost after restart.
The tab grouping mechanism that we are using is very different in concept from Firefox’s Panorama. But the way to show these sessions will be similar to how Firefox shows it, yes.
How about being able to set a background image?
Yes that can be done. But the view is infinitely expandable, thus we need a tilable background.
Only if the background has to change with the view. Which, maybe, it doesn’t.
BY THE WAY, I like what you’re doing 🙂
Will the panorama view be able to support also my groups of bookmarks so i can have a visual view of them too?
Not right now. But it is planned to have some kind of bridge between the two in future.
Great. At the moment i use an addon on firefox to achieve it
have a look here http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/viewmarks-firefox-thumbnail-bookmarks/
and here
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/viewmarks/
is great but i do hope we can have it native in Rekonq.
In firefox panorama, I can give a name to every tab group. Will be possible to make the same in rekonq?
Yes it will be possible. You can have names for every session.
Yes it will be possible. You can have names for every session.
This looks awesome so far! I can’t wait to see it come in to fruition! As someone who just recently returned to KDE, it’s great to see things like this in the works!
Hi!
Something I miss in Firefox Panorama is the possibility to associate each tab group with a different cookies’ session. This way I could easily manage my cookies based on which group the tab I’m currently working is in. Have you ever consider such a functionality for your work in rekonq?
Just to make my thoughts clearer, consider the following use case:
Since I’m a user of gmail, this site is almost always opened in a tab in my browser. Because of this, every time I search something in Google, it knows its me that are doing such a search, even if I don’t want it. If I want to take more control over my privacy, while keeping my gmail tab opened, I have to open another browser window. If I could easily control which cookies each tab sees, I didn’t need to keep another browser running. So, having the possibility to associate each tab group with a different cookie set would be great for me.
Thanks! And congratulations for the great work.