[Panel-devel] Desktop applet: remember icons positions

[Matt Broadstone]

On 8/10/07, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> On Wednesday 08 August 2007, Matías Costa wrote:
> > Hello list. My intention now is to provide icon position persistence. But
> > before I'd like to seek people advice.
>
> please look at how applet persistence is currently implemented. it's very
> simple but pretty effective. i suppose you are, however, looking at how to
> position items in the "desktop applet". personally, i think the desktop
> applet is a design "bump". it shouldn't be one applet (that then has to
> reimplemnt a bunch of stuff that's already there and try and stay "out of the
> way" of the rest of plasma) but multiple applets whose state is maintained by
> a single class that doesn't necessarily paint anything to screen.
>
> essentially, the "desktop applet" really needs to simply call
> Corona::addApplet() when they appear in the $DESKTOP_PATH or when new devices
> are announced and remove them as appropriate (and respondt o the user
> removing said items as well)
>
I guess I disagree, making the desktop just a management applet for a
whole bunch of sub applets is really no different than making it a
single applet with a bunch of sub element icons, except that in a
bigger picture view if we made them all applets we have this huge mess
of applets on the screen as opposed to a single one, plus imagine a
situation where you need to list all loaded applets and have 32 items
on your desktop.. ouch.

Further, the work is just already done and works pretty well so no
need to change it at this point unless we actually have a good reason
to change it to using applets for every icon.

> > [IconPosition::trash.desktop]
> > Xabs=1203
> > Xabs_1280x1024=1203
> > Yabs=855
> > Yabs_1280x1024=855
>
> yeah, not sure that system is very pleasant. in fact, it's pretty fugly imho.
Heh, this is what he meant by applet persistence above. I think its
terrible too, we're going to schedule some time on irc to discuss how
to handle this probably later today or tomorrow.

> the real question is how to handle desktop resizes (which is the point of
> keeping the res in the above example ini file, of course).
Well actually, we don't really care about resolution because we
convert everything into grid coordinates, so we just need to store the
grid size and possibly icon size, and then where each item is in the
grid and vioala.

*snip*

Matt