Getting into plasma

[Christophe Olinger]

Hey plasma people,

My name is Christophe Olinger from Luxembourg (nick binarylooks) and I
am following KDE and especially plasma for a few years now. I learned
C++ a looong time ago (10 years?) and basically I fear it’s all gone.
Nevertheless, I am trying to get into it again especially using Qt.
If somebody is interested in these kind of things: I am 29.9 years old
and have a PhD in molecular biology and worked in the bioinformatics
field. Soon to be father and I hope my immense motivation in coding
will continue.

My main interest lies in getting plasma bling (am I allowed to say
bling?). Onto netbooks and later tablets. I really like the current
plasma-netbook workspace and right now I am thinking about creating a
sort of really simple picture viewer. Since I can basically be
considered a C++ newbie I am a bit afraid of jumping into an existing
project yet. I need to learn. I am currently dissecting the frame
plasmoid to learn about the painter and QPixmaps. (I know about plasma
media center and will have a look at it. If I learn enough with my pet
project, I will surely start contributing to it)

What the viewer should do:
v0.1: Display an image, allow swiping to switch image. Allow a single
image mode and a browse mode. The browse mode will be a grid of images
and you can pan through the grid. Tapping an image will switch to
single picture mode. All this should be fullscreen and feel natural


v0.2 use nepomuk and other stuff to filter your collection, tag images
and rotate them. No additional manipulation

I would appreciate some intial help to get started so here my questions
*Should I learn Qt quick for this and do all this in declarative?
*Should I use plasmalibs as basis for this or start it as a new qt
(kdelibs) app?
*Should this be a C++ plasmoid that I can later tie to a new
containment to make it fullscreen?
*Should I code this as a new containment type? like SAL or newspaper
and this would be picture viewer?
*Could I do this with a javascript plasmoid? I guess not easily
*Should a start with gwenview as basis? and add a new viewmode to gwenview?


Thanks for bearing with me.

Christophe