[PATCH] enhancing kicker menu extensions

[Klas Kalaß]

On a very quick scan of your patch (forgot to attach a new file?) I could not 
see how you make sure that
those strange Menu/Action/Button hybrid things actually distinguish themselves 
graphically from simple menus. I am amazed that with all this usability 
discussions going on, nobody seems to have objected yet. 

It is not acceptable that a user needs to find out by trial an error, which 
"menu button" actually is an "action button" and which really only opens a 
menu. 

The difference to toolbar buttons is, that at least the ones which we find by 
default in KDE applications, are always actions and never just simple menues, 
so the confusion is not that bad.

Personally I was very happy when the konsole button was changed from the 
hybrid behaviour to a simple menu, because I could never get my mind around 
the fact that this "menu button" was not a menu button at all and *always* 
started a konsole by accident before I could select the right menu entry!

Regards,
  Klas

Am Sonntag 14 März 2004 18:24 schrieb Alexander Neundorf:
> Hi,
>
> in kicker there are the menu extensions, e.g. the konsole sessions buttons,
> the settings button, the konqy profiles button and others.
> They look the same as the buttons in the toolbars of many apps (konqy:
> back, up, forward, kmail: get mail, reply, forward) but behave differently.
>
> After some discussion here several people agreed that it would be good if
> there would be the possibility that the kicker buttons behave the same way
> as the toolbar buttons, at least for buttons where it makes sense (Kurt
> Pfeifle, Michael Matz, Stefan Taferner, Friedrich Kossebau).
> So I implemented it and changed the konqy profile button and the konsole
> session button to behave this way: start konsole/konqueror when clicked,
> open the menu after 0.5 seconds, patch attached.
>
> There was a problem: KPanelMenu needs a new virtual function where this
> default action can be implemented. This would have been binary
> incompatible. So I derived a new class KExtPanelMenu which just adds this
> one new virtual function. Everything what uses KPanelMenu stays the same,
> extensions which want to use KExtPanelMenu can use it. For KDE4 this should
> be merged again.
>
> Can I apply or who else should I contact ? I didn't find a kicker-devel
> mailing list and Michael Goffioul didn't respond (I found his name
> somewhere in the sources there).
>
> P.S. Actually, why are the kicker plugin interfaces in libkdeui ? Something
> like libkickerplugins.so would be much better. Can this be done for KDE 4 ?
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