[Panel-devel] Plasmatic widgets

[Fred Schaettgen]

On Sunday, 5. June 2005 10:47, Hans Oischinger wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I didn't yet introduce myself because I joined the list a little late.
> So my name is Hans and my only noticable KDE contribution until now was
> Komposé, an Exposé clone.

Does this mean that the next generation kompose will be part of KDE? :D

...
> Due to my late arrival here I somehow missed the discussion about
> applets/widgets and want to give my 2 cents to it:
> One limitation nearly every Panel on every DE still has is that it's
> geometry is only modifyable in very limited ways.
> Kicker right now is a rectangle that can be positioned at the 4 edges...
> not really overwhelming.

> I'd like to see "plasmatic widgets". That means the user can shape widgets
> freely either when creating panel themes in his vector editing app or even
> better in some kind of editing mode plasma provides (see attachment)
> That would allow the craziest UIs and give the user full control over his
> panel arrangement.

The UI would in fact be crazy. But I fail to see how we want to squeeze a 
system monitor, icon list or whatever in such a shape. Letting the user edit 
the shape in arbitrary ways seems totally useless. The contents of the widget 
dicate constraints on the shapes that make sense. Most widget content will 
work well in a rectangular shape only, so all you can do with them is wasting 
some space by adding a bezier border.
We can have transparent widget, so they can appear in any shape, but for 
containers that layout widgets automatically it is complicated enough to do 
it right with the rectangular bounding boxes.

> Also setting real widget masks is quite important for applets. SuperKaramba
> widgets currently use a rectangle and allow fake transparency to create the
> illusion of, for example, a lava lamp sitting on your desktop.
> We will however need to allow mouse events go through the now transparent
> parts, so that the underlying widgets can receive them.

Agreed. If the widgets are placed manually it should be up to the user to let 
them overlap, and they should behave as expected in that case.

> A problem that may arise is that bezier curve editing is not something
> every user understands, but then again it should only be available in a
> "editing mode" which a a normal user may never see.

Let's talk about things normal users should be allowed to see ;)

Fred

-- 
Fred Schaettgen
kde.sch at ttgen.net