Suggestion about re-usable UI elements

[David Edmundson]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 7:41 PM, Laszlo Papp <lpapp at kde.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a minor (and hopefully not too intrusive :) remark on the
> future design of the project. My disclaimer is that I am not
> particularly experienced with the project, thus please do feel free to
> correct me, if I was wrong. As for my understanding, the KDE Telepathy
> project is currently about to integrate Telepathy into the KDE
> Desktop. This is probably excellent and well-achieved for most of the
> uses, thus it is all fine. :)
>
> Where a little bit of different practicality comes to existence is,
> for instance, the gaming world (perhaps also other custom areas). As
> you may already know, I have been a kde-games contributor for a while.
> I have been actively very interested in integrating Telepathy into our
> Gluon (game distribution and development platform) project since the
> KDE Platform Sprint in Randa, Switzerland. This is a little bit of
> exceptional use case that may require KDE Telepathy integration. I am
> about to mentor a GSoC student for this integration at the moment
> since game players definitely need such features while entertaining
> with their buddies. While playing a game in full-screen mode, the
> "gamer dude" might not wanna interact with the desktop for the
> lifecycle of the game for voice or text message interaction with the
> enemies or allies. :) To put it clear: what we (and others) might need
> is a set of UI elements upon kdeui for kde desktop, and plasma
> components for kde mobile. As far as I understood, the
> "common-internals" is about something similar, but not targetted for
> "external usage" (ie. not exposed). They are shared components
> internally between applications, but not separated into a re-usable
> library.
>
> It would be nice to consider the set of UI elements as a separate
> reusable components in the future. Perhaps for frameworks ?

Yes, we're doing this. We have common widgets and dialogs, even the
entire text chat area is (in theory) re-usable.
The modular nature of approver makes embedding chat into your game
easy peasy and it should work alongside all the other chat stuff
running.

The "internalness" is simply because everything is changing so much.
If anyone used it, you'd probably get rather annoyed at us changing it
all the time. Simply add the flag to CMake and you can use it.
We'll make it public when it stops changing all the time.

>
> Thank you for your hard and ver useful work on the KDE Telepathy project. :)
>
> Best Regards,
> Laszlo Papp
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