[Panel-devel] [PATCH] Beginnings of a panel implementation for discussion

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday 20 August 2007, Robert Knight wrote:
> Back to the technical discussion then folks:
> > - style guide is not followed consistently (some day soon someone is
> > going to poison my food or something for being such a grump about that ;)
>
> Sorry about that.  I know what I'm reading during my next tea break :)
>  Are there any style points which you really care about in particular?
>
> > - why another layout instead of just using HBoxLayout for horizontal
> > panels and VBoxLayout for verticals? i suppose this is a property of
> > using its own Corona at the moment.
>
> As an aside, HBoxLayout and VBoxLayout are very similar internally.  I
> think it would be a good idea to try and merge them to avoid bugs
> arising from duplication.

they have been mostly. it's "just" the layout method that remains duplicated 
and that would be pretty easy to fix with a member variable in BoxLayout that 
records whether it is going horizontally or vertically, then HBox and VBox 
just because convenience classes more or less. iow, exactly how qt does it.

that said, i didn't both doing that because this is code that should only be 
there until 4.1 so haven't been overly concerned about getting the code 
design perfect as long as it all worked.

> One important layout requirement the panel has but many applets do not
> is that the user needs to be able to re-arrange the panel applets
> using drag and drop or the keyboard.  The artists (and myself) would
> like these changes to be animated.

agreed. this really would probably require said support in the layouts (when 
removing an item, adding an item, or swapping items).. it should probably 
alos use Phase (perhaps just for the central triggering rather than the 
actual animation; this would also allow us to turn them on/off quite easily 
while keeping those settings/code in one place (Animator))

> I agree with the requirement for being able to have panels positioned
> against all screen edges.  As for multiple non-overlapping panels
> against a single screen edge, can you think of a use case for this?

it's rather common and when i finally implemented this for kicker in kde3 got 
quite a bit of positive feedback on it. it's used to accomplish things such 
as putting a clock in the lower right corner and launchers in the lower left, 
or a strip of launchers along the top-left side of the screen at the top and 
some small applets in the bottom-right.

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

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
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