Adding widgets to panel?

[Marco Martin]

On Saturday 10 September 2011, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> Hi,
> I'd like to raise the question (again?) if it might make sense to allow
> users to add widgets to the panel.
> The disadvantage would of course be that we would have less control over it
> and add a level of complexity to the UI. But I'm not suggesting to make it
> freely configurable like in Plasma Desktop. That probably is not necessary.
> But it might be useful in some cases to have at least one designated area
> of the panel where widgets can be added. For example a user wants to
> constantly monitor some aspect(s) of the system. She could of course add a
> monitor plasmoid to every activity she uses, but that isn't such a good
> idea (since contour's concept is to have many context-specific
> activities-right?). Or some users might want to have a power-off-button on
> the panel or whatever. So we might offer users a place on the panel to put
> additional widgets in (and remove them from it), but not change the
> default widgets.
> 
> What do you think?
> 

I'm quite on the fence to add the possibility to add widgets on the panel, for 
some reasons,
* makes that ui part pretty complicated, at least implementation wise,  not 
sure if is possible to make the ui part actually simple enough, maybe yes, 
drag and drop from the widget explorer?
* applets that work well in both sides, a planar containment and the panel are 
still not 100%, tough a good percentage (don't think 100% is possible)

by the way, as for widget container that is present in all activities, the 
"widget strip" application is dne for that (still doesn't work in the meego 
installation, i'll take a look on that)
that was done manily for the use case of most plasmoids, like rss news reader, 
twitter etc, that aren't activity specific and don't work well in a container 
with vertical scrolling, because they have it as well.

Cheers,
Marco Martin