Saturday, November 8, 2014

KDE Connect Indicator

KDE Connect is awesome right? To see what it can do take a look at omgubuntu.co.uk blog and also the official blog albertvaka.wordpress.com. The fact that it only have an administer tool for KDE make me sad. In the end  I wrote my own indicator which will help Ubuntu and elementary OS user to use this awesome tool.
This Indicator is written to make KDE Connect usable in Ubuntu and Pantheon DE. It's started as an AppIndicator but later i add a binary file to send file and URL easily through KDE Connect.

Features: 

It even have different icon for tablet and phone!
  1. Indicator in the panel which show your devices, with its name, status, and battery.
  2. menu to request for pairing and unpairing
  3. menu to start sftp and open file browser
  4. small program, kdeconnect-send to help sending file and choosing device
  5. a .contractor file, so you can send file from any of elementary OS's applications

You can share your file from File Manager, Music, Photos, Calendar and Scratch

How to Install

For Ubuntu 14.04 and up

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vikoadi/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install kdeconnect indicator-kdeconnect

then run KDE Connect Indicator applications.

Connect your phone and desktop via tether or router then install kdeconnect application in your Android Phone.

Open your kdeconnect application in your android, a new square indicator should show up in your panel. You can start request pair from indicator.

Limitation

Currently this is have some limitation:
  1. As Ubuntu and Pantheon notification doesn't (yet) support applying or rejecting pair request, you can only request to pair from desktop.
  2. Will work better in KDE Connect 0.7.1 and up
See my other post to do it.

Usage Suggestions

To make life better you can try to apply this:
  1. add KDE Connect Indicator to your startup applications, on your System Setting
  2. for Nautilus or Thunar user, create a Nautilus-actions or Thunar-actions entry with kdeconnect-send %f as command
Please report issues and suggestion here: https://github.com/vikoadi/indicator-kdeconnect

4 comments:

Mauricio said...

Why not in precise?

Viko Adi Rahmawan said...

I don't build Indicator KDEConnect in Precise because there isn't KDE Connect package in Precise. The indicator is useless without it.
The dependency it self shouldn't be a problem.

L.J said...

Will this work with Cinnamon?

Anonymous said...

I'd rather suggest creating script like that below.

#!/bin/bash

while [ $1 ]; do
kdeconnect-send $1
shift
done

Enjoy!