(Update: See Yuen Hoe's nice screencast here and Diego's post here).

There are some moments in life which are just too exciting and thrilling. The best of them came just recently – when Plasmate's first release happened.

Plasmate was started as an application to make creation of Plasma addons like Applets, Runners, Dataengines, Themes easy and fun. A post can be found on Aaron's blog here.

Last year I, Yuen Ho Lim and Diego Casella started working on Plasmate. Initially my job being the editor kpart for which we used KatePart. KPart is a KDE technology which allows component based development using GUIXML.

Here is how Plasmate can be used in its existing stage for JS development-

• A new Plasmoid can be created and JS be selected as the language. A skeleton code with a “Hello” example will be created.
• Plasmate sports an inbuilt editor for editing the script files with code completion right now limited to existing tokens in the file.
• The project tree can be used to browse through different files in the project. Right now, editing metadata, config and script files are supported. Though other files (e.g. images) can be edited, but only in text mode.

• A previewer is there which keeps live preview of the plasmoid being edited. The previewer can be refreshed by using Ctrl+F5 or by using the menu option.

• The best features of Plasmate is timeline support. Plasmate makes it easy to manage projects as git repos and makes it easy to create 'Savepoints' which the developer can use to keep savepoints at different stages of development. All the git actions are performed without the user having to know about them.

• Then, the developer can publish to a .plasmoid file or  on the local computer. Though this has some bugs right now, but works in most cases.

• The developer can view Plasma documentation using the Documentation tab. Having an active internet connection is a prerequisite for this.

There is still lots of work to do in Plasmate and we're really excited by the release. We even had a bug filed ( Bug 226351 ) and fixed 🙂

It feels so nice to see Plasmate progressing towards its goal, and will always remain special for me as its my first project as one of the authors. We have done a great job Yuen Hoe, Diego and we always will. Its fun working with you guys.

Plasmate – My first project as an author 🙂