applet browser widget: the icon and the info

[L Pierre]

See "**PLPL" below.


> Message: 6
> Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:19:19 -0600
> From: "Aaron J. Seigo" <aseigo at kde.org>
> Subject: applet browser widget: the icon and the info
> To: plasma-devel at kde.org
> Message-ID: <200906281719.20272.aseigo at kde.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
> hi ...
> 
> the icon for the applet is off to a good start ... the look
> of it should 
> harmonize with what is in krunner, folderview, etc. we have
> an item background 
> svg ... in fact, we even have a Plasma::IconWidget that
> take care of most and 
> maybe even all of the painting.
> 
> the info widget is also a good start. the info button in
> there is cool too. 
> 
> one thing that becomes evident is that we do need that
> screenshot. this means 
> some support in libplasma, i think. this screenshot will
> need to be an image 
> file on disk.
> 
> for widgets that come in a Plasma::Package, this is easy to
> get. for c++ ones, 
> we'll need a standard location for the screenshot to live.
> 
> $APPDATA/plasma/screenshots? they can be named after the
> pluginName() with a 
> png suffix. we can even make this available perhaps through
> 
> Plasma::Applet::package(). it would fall back to the icon
> if there is no 
> screenshot available. then we just need to spend a couple
> hours screenshotting 
> everything :P
> 
> hm.. maybe ... i bet i could do up a little app that would
> run the applet and 
> save out a screenshot for us. it could rip through all the
> c++ applets and do 
> this for us. if an applet needs config, it would check
> that, wait for it to be 
> configured and then save a snapshot. that way creating
> snapshots would be a 
> matter of running this little app and watching it do it's
> business, 
> configuring something every so often (once configured,
> though, the applet 
> should retain this through to the next run :)
> 
> (i can write the above for/with you, as i'm supposedly the
> maintainer of 
> libplasma and i don't expect you to fix _everything_ in
> plasma as you go ;)
> 
> so, does the above make sense to you? basically you'd be
> able to take a 
> KPluginInfo and get out a screenshot that you can assign to
> the icon and then 
> pass into the info widget. in fact, the model can provide
> access to this for 
> the icon/widget.
> 
> ok, so .. now the placement of the info widget is a bit
> awkward. it mostly 
> works in dolphin because there's a bunch of info shown
> there and moving focus 
> from a file to the info doesn't seem mentally like such a
> big deal.
> 
> for the applet browser ...... not so sure :)
> 
> so here's my suggestion: let's use clickable
> Plasma::ToolTips. mouse over the 
> applet and you get a tooltip. want info, click on the info
> button in the 
> tooltip. this will work _really_ nicely if the icon list is
> in a horizontal or 
> vertical list.

**PLPL: This will be great and also if it is available for labels. If I understand correctly the tooltip "info" should be a string as input and displayed as a balloon pop-up like the tooltip gets displayed.

Example: We have a note taking app. Our note title is displayed/painted as a label. Hover over lablel, choose info button in tooltip which displays the note creation date, modification date etc. collected from Nepomuk, in our case, that was put into a string. Maybe also add the Eclipse like pop-up where hovering over classes/methods you have the option to "Press F2 for focus". Move the mouse away and all disappears. 

Possible text formatting (plain and html) for this tooltip "info" text  will also be great, but not essential.   

Hope it makes sense.


> thoughts?
> 
> -- 
> Aaron J. Seigo
> humru othro a kohnu se
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> 
> KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software
>