Can my application, which contains dirty code, become an official kde application?

[Nicolas Fella]

On 1/17/24 03:12, Danilo Agostini wrote:
> Hi, I developed an application and was thinking about doing the
> incubation process but I'm not sure if my application will be accepted
> due to some defects.
>
> What my application does:
>
> It allows the user, through the use of a keyboard shortcut or a
> dolphin servicemenu, to have a quick preview of the files that are
> shown in the folder without having to open the default application.
>
> Similar applications are Gnome Sushi and Quick Look (Mac os).

Hi,

this looks like a cool project, congrats!

 From a KDE perspective code quality concerns are mostly secondary,
because we can always fix/improve things there. The most important
question is what UX do we want to provide. Any implementation has to
follow that, and not the other way around.

> Technical Limitations/Defects:
>
> 1) The way it integrates with dolphin is not clean due to dolphin's
> limitations: I currently use dbus to copy the path of the selected
> file into the clipboard and read it from my program. This, in addition
> to not being a clean way, also causes corruption of the content that
> was previously copied to the clipboard. I was able to get the
> previously copied text to be restored, but there is no way to restore
> the contents if what was copied to the clipboard before opening my
> application was a file.

It seems like what you would need is a way to obtain the currently
selected file from Dolphin via DBus (without detouring through the
clipboard). I don't think that exists right now, but it should be easy
enough to add.

> 2) The preview of some files (odt,doc,docx,xlsx,etc) is obtained by
> converting the documents to pdf using the "libreoffice --headless
> --nolockcheck --norestore --convert-to pdf" command. This obviously
> requires libreoffice installed on the system and the conversion may
> fail/be slow in some cases.

I'd recommend you look at
https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kio/html/classKIO_1_1PreviewJob.html.
That's what Dolphin uses to create thumbnails and it has support for a
huge variety of file types. While Dolphin typically generates rather
small thumbnails it should be able to give you thumbnails of any
requested size.

> https://github.com/Nyre221/Kiview
> https://github.com/Nyre221/Kiview/blob/master/src/dolphinbridge.cpp
> https://github.com/Nyre221/Kiview/blob/master/src/documentviewer.cpp
>
> I'm writing this here because it's what was suggested to me.
>
> Is there any chance that something like this could be accepted, or is
> it better if I continue to develop it myself?
>
> Thank you.