contextview themeing: plasmification?

[Leo Franchi]

On 7/7/07, Nikolaj Hald Nielsen <nhnfreespirit at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Other attendes at aKademy spent a lot more time time looking into
> plasma than me, but I will give you my thoughts on the issue.
>
> I like the general idea, but as I mentioned to the other devs at
> aKademy, I think we need to start seriously narrowing the scope of
> features we will try to implement for Amarok 2.0 in order to have at
> least a usable beta by the time KDE 4.0 ships. This particular feature
> does sound like it could eat up a LOT of time.


i definitely understand this concern. we need to have a working amarok
relatively soon, at least in time for
KDE4.0. but IMHO if,
after we put all of this work into the CV, it is still dog-slow and
unusable, then we'll just have wasted a lot of time. also, this
architecture
doesn't need to be *that* complicated. when i said it would take a
while i means a few weeks maximum, not months :) i mean, most of the
code exists already in plasma, i would need to port and adapt it.


Also, and maybe more significantly, there are ideas floating around to
> make the plasma canvas "embeddable" in applications in a future
> release of KDE. This would mean not only theming support, but also the
> ability to drag the context items to the desktop or wherever


this is definitely a very interesting concept. problem i see with this
is that its still an "idea floating around". and "future release of
KDE" also does not sound
like something we can rely upon. either way, we need something to rely
on that makes amarok2 awesome and that is usable. pinning our hopes on
a
yet-to-materialize feature of KDE does not seems like the best way to
approach this. furthermore, if this feature does ever come to exist,
then we would
of course refactor to support it.


- Nikolaj
>
> On 7/7/07, Leo Franchi <lfranchi at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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
> >
> > --
> > ______________________________________________________
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-- 
______________________________________________________
Leo Franchi                    angel666 at myrealbox.com
4305 Charlemagne Ct         lfranchi at gmail.com
Austin                                 cell: (650) 704 3680
TX, USA                              home: (650) 329 0125
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