Share, like, connect

[Marco Martin]

Hi all,
during the last two weeks there was quite some progress with the share/like 
connect infrastructure:
we have a dataengine, that can provide share,like and connect actions as 
plugins, c++ or javascript

to know what to share with, it will use the activity manager (more on the 
build dependency side later)

there is an applet as well, that will show different menus for the 3 groups of 
actions.
a screenshot of the preliminary version is
http://i.imgur.com/KiAZB.jpg

some entries will have a "second step", connect with activities for instance 
will have a step asking to what activity connect or disconnect to. the menu 
slides away and shows the new one instead.
other actions, like "share on twitter" will have a step asking for a text 
message to post.

right now 3 example plugins are written: one for share: sends files as 
attachment (with the recommendations engine in place it could also suggest who 
to send it to) one for like, the rating widget with 5 stars, one for connect, 
connect a resource to the current activity.
in the end, the mumber of those entries (at least the enabled ones) won't be 
huge, since it would cause a messy interface otherwise.

An idea discussed last week, would be completely replace the resources context 
menu with this, since the use case overlaps if not 100, 99.99%

a prototype of an ui without context menu, with menus in the 3 icons and 
activate by slide instead of clicking, is in the usual demo interface should 
load in plasma-contour by default (so an updated image should load it)

the real applet at the moment is using another way: the actual slc menu is 
actually a component usable by any applet, so it's using a version with 
share,like and connect united in a single menu:
http://i.imgur.com/x5GO3.jpg

now, the more technical things:
a difference here with the previous context menu is that is now a Dialog, so 
is a separate window, that has the advandage of working both in the desktop 
and panel (the old one would have worked only directly in the desktop 
containment, not in panels, and not in any applets that aren't the 
containment)

the disadvantage is that it has a less fancy appear animation (could be done 
with a kwin effect maybe) and it loses the baloon tip. it could be added in 
Dialog but i don't really like to add new api (*maybe* could be done just in 
the qml bindings)


Now, on the build dependency part:
* SLC dataengine and applet are in a separate repository: that should become a 
runtime dependency to plasma-mobile and contour packages
* to actually work, slc must also notice what the current resource is, and 
that means using the contour branches of kdelibs and kde-runtime.
those will be needed as well for the recommendations to work.

Cheers,
Marco Martin