contextview themeing: plasmification?

[Leo Franchi]

hey everyone-
    so as leinir mentioned to me yesterday, the guys over at akademy were
discussing the problem of themeing in the context view, and  a solution that
was similar to the plasma theme engine came up. now, everyone at akademy a)
knows more about how plasma works internally than i do (even after a few
hours of grokking the code) b) has already thrown this idea around. i just
want to open it up to everyone else and see what people think.

basically, how it works is plasma renders SVG pixmaps onto the QGraphicsView
desktop. it works something like this: 1) widget loads the svg widget theme
2) when time comes to display data, the widget paints the data "through" the
SVG-- it takes care of the layout. 3) rendered pixmap is put onto desktop.
this is very good for many reasons, including resolution independence, but
most importantly, artists can provide theme packages of SVGs that completely
control the layout of the widgets. this would fit exactly with our needs.
also, it does caching of the SVGs so apparently its quite efficient.

the con  that i can see right now is this: it's quite significantly more
complicated than the current system. not that that is necessarily bad, but
its just going to take longer to implement/perfect.

also, plasma is fast :) and right now amarok2 is really slow. especially
(but not only) the contextview. so if this helps, i'm all for it. i'm also
willing to code this up, but basically want to gauge your guys' reactions:
do you think it's a good idea? comments? problems?

leo

-- 
______________________________________________________
Leo Franchi                    angel666 at myrealbox.com
665 Channing Ave         lfranchi at gmail.com
Palo Alto                        cell: (650) 704 3680
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