Updates and plans for the next Hawaii version

QtDay and FOSDEM are over and I finally took some time to update the plans for the next Hawaii version.

First things first. Next Hawaii iteration will be the 0.3.0 release.
At first I thought to do minor improvements in a 0.2.1 version and release shortly after 0.2.0 but then I decided to do more work.

Most of the stuff is already implemented at this point, but it needs further improvements.

So what should you expect for Hawaii 0.3.0?

Weston 1.4 is here now so the plugin was ported to the new version, some code refactoring is needed though to make the code more manageable.
The plugin will also support drop-down windows and a whitelist for trusted clients that need to access some Wayland interfaces (a possible usage is a screenshot application).

Shell is going to be improved with better multiple screen management, multiple panels (you can have one panel for each edge), configuration directly accessible from the panel, elements in panels can be reordered.

There was also a major refactoring, components such as dialogs, popups and overlays were moved to a plugin that can be used by external QML applications.

This was necessary in order to separate the PolicyKit agent and notifications daemon from the shell.
Other desktops (I'm thinking about LXQt here) can use these components more easily now if they wish.
Both are not launched by the shell automatically and currently there's no switch to turn them on and off but there are units for the systemd user session so you can manage them from the command line or with a graphical frontend. I can't exclude a service manager integrated in Hawaii in the future but there are no plans yet.

Compositor and deamons now notify systemd upon startup and as I mentioned above there is support for systemd user session however I'm having some problems running weston.

Screensavers. Yes it's a bit anachronistic but some people might enjoy it.
It's disabled by default and currently there is no switch to turn it on and off, later a preferences applet will be available.

As I showed during FOSDEM, now Hawaii can switch between different layouts on the fly.
This is one of the main goals of this project and goes by the name of convergence these days.
I will talk more about it in another post but the idea is to have a dedicated user interface for different devices and even react to things like input devices or screen resolution changing.

This work also make it easier to implement animated wallpapers because the shell is now much modular and can load different components.
Currently the background is implemented by a QML component that according to the settings draws a picture, a solid color or a gradient.
Animated wallpapers are just loadable QML components that does nice stuff such as animations, react to mouse click and tap to change the background and so on.
At this point it becomes clear that Hawaii needs a generic way to deal with this things, hence the standard background is going to be split in a wallpaper plugin, a solid color plugin and a gradient plugin and will be no more different than animated wallpapers.

Here you can see the task list.