[Panel-devel] [RFC] Interaction model for "building" your shell

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 14 September 2005 04:01, Kevin Ottens wrote:
> around to build his shell. Each plasmoid has resize handles. If on the
> edge, you only have one handle available for resizing, otherwise you have
> two of them. That means that you fully control the size of a plasmoid in
> the case of a two dimensions layout, but you only control its height if
> it's placed on the bottom edge for example.

i'v been thinking about ways to present these handles clearly and in a way 
that looks good. unlike our current kicker handles ;) i think i'm going to 
have to end up deferring this one to the artists and usability folk.

> As for resizing, the solution looks clear to me, when several plasmoids are
> connected together, you get handles only for the biggest rectangular sets
> of plasmoids

yep.

> 1) We consider having a special handle as overlay on the plasmoids
> connected edges. When clicked, the connection is broken, and the plasmoids
> are slightly moved so that there's some room between them.
> 2) We consider the first (as in read-order) to be the "master plasmoid" if
> you move it, you move the whole group, otherwise you split the group at the
> moved plasmoid. For example, if I have a row of four plasmoids, if I move
> the one at the left it'll move the full group since I read from the left to
> the right. If I move the third one (counting from the left), it'll result
> in two rows of two plasmoids.

i think this might be a little confusing unless we make the visuals really 
clear, but prefer this to the first option simply because it means everything 
happens on drag. this tends to be easier to work with, both for the user and 
the coder =)

it really almost seems like we'll want to have an "edit mode". e17 does this 
IIRC.

> And finally... The open issue... How to trigger the "edit the shell" mode?

ah, and here you get to the hard of it.

> I see two possibilities:
> 1) Having a handle on each plasmoid that you can use for dragging. I'm not
> sure it's really nice from a visual perspective...

agreed

> 2) Having a special action "somewhere"(*) triggering the edit mode. In this
> case every windows are hidden, and only the desktop and its plasmoids are
> accessible until you switch back to the normal mode.

yes, we just need to find a place for it. this is a job for the usability 
people =)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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