launching applets

[Bart Cerneels]

2007/8/17, Leo Franchi <lfranchi at gmail.com>:
> On 8/16/07, Seb Ruiz <ruiz at kde.org> wrote:
>
> >  On 17/08/07, Leo Franchi <lfranchi at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > hey guys,
> > >
> > > so for those who have tried out the contextview stuff, currently the way you
> > > add applets is using the swooping-out controlbox in the top-left corner.
> > > this is because its easy... it's coming directly from plasma. but honestly i
> > > don't think we want it in the final version of 2.0, its more suited for the
> > > desktop than in amarok.

The current implementation isn't even suited for the desktop. A
horizontal slide-out bar in the center of an edge of the desktop would
be better in my opinion. And a better graphic!

> >  > that said, i don't really have any idea of what a better system could be. so
> > > i'm completely open to ideas... ideally i'd like to write something up
> > > relatively soon, so feel free to just toss ideas out and i can try them.

How about a semi transparent bar in the bottom of the CV. it can even
autohide (bad for discoverability). I wouldn't mind if it looked and
behaved exactly like the Apple dashboard widget picker.

> > Some considerations might be - how often do we want, or expect users
> > to change these applets. If there are going to be relatively static,
> > it might be wise to have a page in the settings dialog. However, I
> >  don't think this is really going to be the use case. I imagine that
> > the applets will be changed regularly enough to warrant a faster
> > solution.
>
> yeah, i dont think we should hide the applet stuff too much, because it's nice to be able to
> easily add/remove them. although, the way i see myself using it is pretty much setting
> things up once, and then keeping it like that until i install more that i want to see.

I can imagine removing the lyrics applet to make room for the wiki
applet a lot. To help the user do what was very easy in 1.4 (just a
click on the tab in contextbrowser) we could provide buttons that
automatically arrange applets in preconfigured layouts. Or quickly
replace the lyrics applet with the wiki applet.

> > Without having put much thought into it, perhaps it would be useful to
> >  have a menu entry with all of the available applets. These can be
> > toggled from the menu and can be categorised under different groups.
> > I'd expect all of the applets to be available from the menus, even if
> > they can't be enabled or disabled.
> >
> > A context menu popup menu could be issued with a right click on the
> > view, allowing adding or removing applets relevant only the the
> > currently displaying information.

Don't you know right-click Context Menus are evil! Kicker replaced the
context menu system with a applet picker window for 3.5.0 I believe,
which was a HUGE improvement. Watch and learn.

> i like this idea---we could have a right click context menu on the contextview background > which opens a simple add/remove applets dialog. i'm just thinking something simple, with
> a drop-down list of what "type" of applet to show ( e.g. home, current), which filters the
> list, then you can add/remove from the filtered list to the current pane.

As much as I liked the applet picker improvement of Kicker, the best
sollution is not having yet another modal window. I'll stick with the
dashboard like applet picker, which might be a plasmoid itself.

>
>
> >  I don't know if a button to launch a manager on the actual context
> > view is a good idea, as i imagine that it would look cluttered and
> > impede on the functionality.
>
>
> i agree. :)
>
> leo
> > seb
> > > leo

Stecchino