[Panel-devel] Plasma Desktop: Drop Forwarding

[Sébastien Laoût]

Hello,

First, I want to say that you have very good and refreshing ideas for Plasma 
in KDE4.
I can't wait :-)

I have a little suggestion:
The concept of dragging things from the panel to the desktop or a window is 
cool.
But I think the concept can be extended to other applications that are not 
panel/desktop applets.

So, other applications could also allow to drop things from them to the 
desktop.

When such data is dropped to the desktop, the desktop should forward the event 
to this application, so it can process it by creating a new applet to the 
desktop to handle the dragged data, etc...

I'm mainly thinking this for a note-taking program I'm doing.
I've done a mockup for you to imagine better what I'm trying to say:
http://basket.kde.org/developement/baskets_on_desktop_for_kde4.png
Every items/notes are grouped into a container/window/applet.
And when dragging an item for this container to the desktop, it should create 
a new container at this point to embed the moved item.

This can be used for other purposes, I think.
Applications could allow to drop things to the panel to add its own applet.
* Think about dragging a mixer channel from KMix to the panel to automatically 
popup an applet on the panel for that mixer channel.
* Dragging a contact from KAdressBook to the desktop would popup a card (with 
photo, phone number, email link...) widget/applet;
* Dragging an RSS stream from Konqueror statusbar to the desktop would add a 
small newsticker
* Moving KPpp systray icon would add a statistics widget to the desktop
* KSysGuard monitors could be dropped to the desktop to add "sensors"
... that's only examples/ideas, more or less useful (perhapse it would not be 
so visible to the user that those are draggable, a special recognisable new 
widget could do the job...)

The feedback from the desktop to the application can be a DCOP event or 
somewhat else.
But I would like to know if the idea seems good to you before speaking about 
technical details.

Cheers,

Sébastien Laoût.

PS.: I'm not subscribed, so please CC me.