removal of KWhatsThisManager?

[David Jarvie]

On Fri, May 14, 2010 10:25 pm, Thomas Lübking wrote:
> Am Friday 14 May 2010 schrieb Hugo Pereira Da Costa:
>> To jump on that, and because we discussed it recently in #oxygen,
>> the appearance of what's this dialogs is _ugly_ (what the hell is this
>> patterned shadow ?)
> pre-composite way to handle things
> (popups had them as well :-)
>
>> and not stylable (the QWhatsThat::paintEvent method is
>> 100% hard coded and makes no access to the widget style() at all.
>
> you could probably check for "widget->isWindow() && widget-
>>inherits("QWhatsThat")" and set an own palette (this time with
> glossy/gradient/texture brush ;-) but it's frankly simply not worth it :-P
>
> If one really (really!) needs to hint "what's this" i'd recommand to
> a) review your UI (have a look at the Qt API sample: "open file"
> toolbutton..)
> b) add a tooltip and remove it after being shown 4 or 5 times.
>
> I do not think KDE applications should make any use of this.

I find whats-this a very useful thing sometimes, as a user. It can
provide, when appropriate, a much longer text than would be reasonable for
a tooltip. Sometimes when you can't understand exactly what a control is
for, the choice is opening the manual, searching through it to try to find
the right section to see if what you want to know is stated there - a long
process - or, just view a whats-this, which, if it's implemented, can give
a quickly accessed bit of context help.

We should be promoting whats-this (by making whats-this texts universal),
not getting rid of it.

-- 
David Jarvie.
KDE developer.
KAlarm author - http://www.astrojar.org.uk/kalarm