[Panel-devel] applet facilities

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday 05 January 2006 19:36, Ryan wrote:
> On Wednesday 04 January 2006 17:49, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> Returning to the drawback issue, creating widget styles needs to be easy.
> As simple as someone drawing a pixmap and selecting borders, corners, body
> of widget, etc., so that the average joe can contribute to our
> beautification. I'm kind of speaking of what I saw geieri doing the other
> night so I know that this is mostly possible if not already closely there. 

i agree.. i have already added an applet bundle creator to the plasma wiki, 
and i'm waiting on some svg files from ken weimer to start on the general 
theming and then we can do a nice little gui for that too.

> > applet bundles: applets should come with bundles. C++ based applets will
> > ship both a library and a bundle, while script applets will provide just
> > a bundle with the scripts included. basically what sk does right now. i
> > would like to sanitize the layout of the bundles, though, and define how
> > things are generally laid out. that way we can provide a nice little
> > bundle assembler GUI for applet authors.
>
> Mandating the layout to be more strict than the current SK schema would be
> a good idea as it has created a little more complexity than I want, but it
> still does the job for what it does.

yep; this is all about looking at what we have (kicker, kdesktop, 
superkaramba) and asking what could be done better. i'm sure we'll repeat the 
process in another 5 years ;)

> > by keeping all the files in a /plasma dir, we can then add more
> > directories in the future so that hopefully a theme pack may include
> > svg's for widget styles, window decorations and plasma bits... we should
> > have some sample svg's to play with in svn shortly, courtesy of ken.
>
> Is there going to be some sort of manifest as well in the widget bundle so
> that way things like version, author, license, contact info, binding
> language, etc.?

yes, we'll need a licensing/authorship file in both theme and applet bundles. 
applet .desktop files contain the binding language information.

> Will we have a way to tie the bundle to some initial relative position on
> the screen when ran so that later in the game we can tie multiple widgets
> to a complex layout of sorts?  i.e. Foo widget is top/left corner of screen
> layout and Bar widget is RightOf Foo.

we had talked about being able to save layouts, so i can imagine this as well. 
i haven't gotten that far in thinking things through in detail. sounds like 
you've been putting some though in it. do you want to take on theme and 
applet bundles and layout saving?

-- 
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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