Animated labels and progress bars in Oxygen considered harmful?

[Hugo Pereira Da Costa]

Hi Aurelien, others,

So after some discussion with Nuno (my favorite artist, to whom I 
usually turn in case of conflicts and doubts).

 From the discussion it turns out that if you want a somewhat animated 
desktop, IMO (or rather IOO -our opinion), QStyle is actually the right 
place to implement it (rather than custom widgets, or extended widgets), 
because it ensures consistency across applications, while letting this 
to devs on an App by App basis would lead to a mess (that we have been 
seeing in old windows versions, and in some kde apps already.)

This of course implies that
1/ the animations in question are well written
2/ if you don't want an animated desktop you can turn it off.

I don't think there is anything wrong for a style to decide that it will 
handle some animations, as a new feature, on top of rendering, provided 
that items 1/ and 2/ above are enforced.

now on this precise case (animated labels), first there are some cases 
(the majority of them IMO) where they work pretty well. To name a few:
- in status bars (notably konqueror status bar, when you get a link 
target address displayed when hovering on links in the main page)
- in status labels (like elapsed time in amarok, or countdown in the 
logout window).
- in some plasmoids (e.g openbrain)

I agree that it does not look well at the moment in tooltips (even the 
"plain" ones, not only the customized ones in gwenview). I would 
consider it as a bug, that needs to be fixed, and not an argument to 
remove the entire thing. I would better focus on doing this (the 
bugfixing), rather than discuss whether it is in the styles prerogatives 
or not to animate stuff (because I think it is).

Same thing on the point being made about applications crashing due to 
animations: this is a crash report. This must be fixed (either at the 
style level or at the app level). This has already happened (and was 
hopefully fixed) when oxygen was doing rendering only. I don't think 
this invalidates the idea of doing animations at the style level as a whole.

Now as a dev, you are of course free to implement your own widgets, 
bypass the style, etc. (many applications do that all the time, and  in 
fact, gwenview already does that for tooltips, with or without the 
animation, right ?)

Finally, I think we will have quite some occasions during kde4.4 beta 
cycle to see how users (rather than devs) react to these animations and 
whether or not they are happy with them.

Hugo