[Panel-devel] Plasmatic widgets

[Hans Oischinger]

On Sunday 05 June 2005 13:58, Fred Schaettgen wrote:
> Does this mean that the next generation kompose will be part of KDE? :D
Hehe I wish... well I hope that a real replacement for Exposé (with all the 
animations) can somehow be integrated into KDE. Imo Arthur and Composite are 
the tools to make it happen.
It will however also depend on how strong we want to imitate Apple (hello 
lawyers!) and on our own creativity. Maybe we can do better than Exposé?
I still think that a taskbar is still better than lots of icons with arrows on 
the bottom of your screen. Exposé is somehow a workaround for their lack of a 
taskbar.

> The UI would in fact be crazy. But I fail to see how we want to squeeze a
> system monitor, icon list or whatever in such a shape. Letting the user
> edit the shape in arbitrary ways seems totally useless. The contents of the
> widget dicate constraints on the shapes that make sense. Most widget
> content will work well in a rectangular shape only, so all you can do with
> them is wasting some space by adding a bezier border.
> We can have transparent widget, so they can appear in any shape, but for
> containers that layout widgets automatically it is complicated enough to do
> it right with the rectangular bounding boxes.
Right, it's not something I would use for what we currently know as kicker.
Rectangular layouts are not only easier, they do also make much more sense 
than anything curved as windows are rectangular, too and it would look stupid 
to maximize a window and get some holes between the panel and the window 
border.
But I can see uses in external panels that integrate specific components. 
Actually it's the same as we already have in SuperKaramba (explicit 
positioning of items). You design your themes in some editor just the way you 
want it and put it on your desktop.
But why shouldn't we also allow explicitly placed rectangular areas that 
contain applets?
My proposal is not all that revolutionary, it's just a different sort of 
containerwidgets for applets :)

> > A problem that may arise is that bezier curve editing is not something
> > every user understands, but then again it should only be available in a
> > "editing mode" which a a normal user may never see.
>
> Let's talk about things normal users should be allowed to see ;)

OK, that bezier editing is a little sick :), but I remember a desktop addition 
for windows 95 that allowed something like image map editing for desktop 
backgrounds to create clickable areas on the desktop... it failed however to 
become mainstream :)

Hans
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