How to get the Project Dashboard right

[Aleix Pol]

On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 5:34 PM, David Nolden <zwabel at googlemail.com> wrote:

> One thing about plasma: it is simply the wrong tool for this tasks. Other
> approaches for re-using plasma for similar things imo failed completely (see
> amarok), and ended up emulating a completely normal widgets+tabs interface.
>
> Plasma is optimized for allowing the user to build his own user-interface,
> and the only place where this seems appropriate is the desktop.
>
> To me the right tool for this job seems to be a simple qwebview. Create the
> layout using html, allow themeing it through css, and if required you can
> even embed custom widgets to display whatever stuff you like.
>
> Greetings, David
>
> Am 29.04.2010 15:35 schrieb "Aleix Pol" <aleixpol at kde.org>:
>
> On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 12:20 AM, Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> > As you will probably...
> Hi,
> I was talking to some Plasma folks yesterday and I think it would be worth
> giving it a try. That way we can get some stuff for free: mainly the
> existing plasmoids and theming which is great.
>
> The bad news is that there are a couple of changes required to have it the
> way I'd like it. First of all, it's not yet possible to add Plasma::Applet*
> instances directly, now it has to go through a different plugin and I
> wouldn't like it a lot like that. The good news on that is that they're
> willing to fullfill this use case so in the worst case we just would have to
> wait.
>
> The other problem is that we need to get Plasma to use our project.kdev4
> file instead of some ~/.kde4/share... file. The main reason for that is that
> we want that to be versioned so there's a project-wide dashboard version. We
> could provide the KConfig instance to plasma so that it writes to the file
> we want it to write on or we could try to workaround that by configuring the
> Plasma instance ourselves every time we use it.
>
> Another problem would be that we'll have to wait for the Plasma KPart to be
> released at sometime next month.
>
> That's it for the moment.
> Aleix
>
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>
Sure, I thought about that.
The thing is that here we will be versioning the project file so here when
it's modified, we will be modifying the representation for the whole project
which i think is more or less what we're aiming for.

What I don't really like about using HTML approach is that the plugin who
generated the information to react to events and that it makes it hard to
organize the UI (even if it is a dashboard we want the dashboard to be
configured too!). Of course we can workaround it but I think it's not the
cleanest approach. I could create the dashboard myself using QGV also, as I
said before but I'd like to see first were does Plasma take us. In the end
its recycling code which is always a good idea and since it is a KDE
project, we can always hack it to also do us good.

In the amarok case, I think the main problem is that they are just using too
much plasma features, I'd like to get to have a dashboard that looks
integrated with our UI and that should be possible with Plasma.

Cheers!
Aleix
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