netbook reference, the polishing details

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On March 19, 2010, Marco Martin wrote:
> On Friday 19 March 2010, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > hi all.... (and particulaly Marco :)
> > 
> > we pulled out P's old (first gen!) EEE PC and stuck a USB key with the

btw, i should probably note some specs: this is a 2 year old device running a 
Celereon M clocked at 630MHz with half a gig of RAM. "free" noted usage in the 
low 200MB range after a full usage (2 pages of widgets set up, sal used a 
number of times, etc)

> i'm seeing possibly other apps that would want a different space saving
> setup in this case?

probably; so we need to find a way to set this globally. if only we had a kded 
plugin where we could publish such context type information to.

;)

maybe we could add this to the activities manager? a bit of physical form 
factor information? it's not strictly activities related, shouldn't require 
nepomuk, but it is related to the idea of context?

otherwise, another kded plugin would probably Do The Trick. essentially a 
simple enumeration sitting on the bus with a signal for when it changes.

> > * configuring the pages breaks the look and feel completely because it
> > opens a "normal" dialog that fullscreens itself and so we go from pretty
> > pretty pictures to the dull grey of a full screen qwidget. perhaps an
> > experiment in embedding the dialog into the view (full screen still of
> > course :) and setting a background translucency on it might at least
> > improve things?
> 
> not totally sure, but te situation has to be improved anyways (it's me
> single biggest pain when i think about plasma-mobile where this problem
> would be 100 times worse)
> giving the dialog a default applet background would look quite nice
> perhaps. the danger in that is that with transarency you have to make sure
> the palette is the plasma one, in dept for every sub widget or you could
> risk invisible widgets (the krunner config ui styed broken for months :p)
> but yeah, something has to be tried(tm)

how about, at least in the compositing case, a translucent background like the 
dashboard? leave everything else as-is, except maybe the window text color 
(which would need to be a contrast colour, obvoiusly). should be easier to 
pull off since it wouldn't be necessary to mess with the entire palette? it 
would also let one see the netbook UI in the background.

> > there are also an interesting assortment of minor annoyances, like how
> > gwenview flickers something fierce when using the thumbnail bar to step
> > through a full screen slideshow, or how the add widgets dialog sometimes
> > appears as a window with window decorations but those are just "garden
> 
> talking about the add widgets dialog, @tokamak we talked about stuffing it
> in the toolbox: i've tought about it, and while it would look way
> prettier, it has the problem exaclt of being into a containment. since the
> panel is locked, it's possible to interact with the tabbar with the add
> widget ui open, so switch on the other pages: it makes sense so to have
> the add widget ui as a different window, shown regardless of what
> containment is currently active

that's fine; but the window appears with window decorations showing :) which 
makes it look very clumsy. i don't think that's the intended presentatin 
though.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
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