[kde-community] Plasmoids and Apps - was - Re: Applications in KDE Generation 5

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday, January 16, 2014 11:46:33 Kevin Krammer wrote:
> On Thursday, 2014-01-16, 10:43:42, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> I also thought about plasma-windowed when reading that :)
> 
> However, I think it is one of those "hidden gems" that nobody knows about.
> I've had questions like "can I run $applet stand-alone" on the user support
> lists a couple of times and plasma-windowed was the answer.
> 
> Its drawback currently is that it is not very easy to figure out what to
> pass as its commandline argument.

KRunner will do this for you, actually. If you type “calc”, and the plasmoid 
runner is installed, you’ll get a match offering to run the plasmoid in a 
window. Well, it doesn’t  actually *say* that, since that’s jargon, but that’s  
what the match does. 

For plasmoids suited to being run as an app they should also install a 
.desktop file with this command in it so that it is completely transparent to 
the user.

All of the above occurs in Plasma Active, so we know it works well from a 
technical POV.

> > We also have an “application” form factor for plasmoids for ~1 year 
now
> > which allows these components to make useful adjustments between being
> > embedded as a plasmoid component and being run as a top-level window.
> 
> Wow, nice! I don't think I've ever heard about this before and I am even
> monitoring plasma-devel.

We did it for Plasma Active because we found ourselves needing it there. I 
know it was blogged about by both myself and Marco (perhaps others?), but 
blogs are indeed easily missed. It should become more visible with Qt5 where 
(as you note below) we can realistically start creating full desktop apps with 
QML, making the lines are blurry enough on Desktop to start using it there. In 
Active, the lines are already blurry / non-existent ... but more people use 
Desktop still ;)

> > I don’t think it makes huge amounts of sense to turn ksnapshot into a
> > plasmoid, but KCalc probably would as it would give us feature parity
> > between the version on the desktop (and panels). Right now we have 2
> > calculators with differing features and levels of maintenance.
> 
> I think these kind of convergences will become more natural once we can do
> traditional UI with QML (either through QtQuick.Controls or
> DeclarativeWidgets). Using the same application logic both for stand-alone
> application as well as Plasma applet becomes trivial then.

Agreed; I think it really starts to make sense with the advent of the QtQuick 
Controls.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo