Settings Human Interface Guidelines first draft online

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Tuesday 03 January 2012 21:23:20 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> On Sunday 01 January 2012 21:04:53 Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> > ok, so it's the second one. Could you make that a little bit more clear by
> > not calling the section "Instant Apply" but maybe "Apply without restart"
> > or something in that direction?
> 
> Well actually it's supposed to be both: Apply instantly on change of any
> value without users having to click "okay" or "apply" _and_ without the
> need to restart the application.
> Would that be feasible?
if the application has to support instant changes without "apply" or "okay" 
then it has to support it without needing a restart. So all this about not 
needing restart is rather redundant.

Technically I doubt that this will be feasable for existing KDE applications 
which want to provide a custom interface for Active. All our dialogs use the 
apply button and is mostly done in a way that the apply button causes saving 
the UI to config file and then the settings get reloaded. Having it to apply 
instantly would mean not only to rewrite the config UI to adapt to active but 
also to change the logic behind and introduce different behavior for desktop 
and active.

For applications newly written for active this does not matter but would 
create inconsistency between the applications with some needing apply and 
others not.

Personally I would just ignore the requirement to apply instantly due to 
additional development effort this would cause.

But here others should state their opinion, too :-)
> 
> > > Could it be made possible to inform applications of config changes e.g.
> > > via DBUS or something?
> > 
> > Yes that is possible. KWin uses that to apply settings changed in KCMs.
> > The
> > KCM emits a signal and KWin listens for it.
> 
> Nice, so that shouldn't be a problem, right? ;)
Yes, but only after "Apply". Without apply this is a non-trivial issue.

Cheers
Martin
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