[Panel-devel] engines, animators, oh my

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hey all...

thought i'd drop a note to bring people up to speed with where things are...

engines can now create items on demand, such as when an applet calls 
connectSource, by reimplementing dataSourceRequested. what's really neat is 
that data sources made in this manner also dissapear automagically when the 
last listener is disconnected.

this takes care of one type of engine configuration need: what to display. use 
cases:

 - which timezones to publish in TimeEngine (this is working already; check 
out the clock applet's config =)
 - RSS feeds to grab

the other sort of configuration relates to configuring behaviour. use cases:

 - to update TimeEngine every second or just every minute
 - show only the last N articles in an RSS feed

i discussed with kevin today about how to go about this and we came up with 
some ideas. i figure the configuration needs to be per-source and per-applet, 
with aggregation at each level (so the per-applet configs aggregated 
per-source, and the per-source configs aggregated per-engine). the engine 
will need to define some parameters for this aggregation (e.g. should a value 
take the max or min setting?) ... i think i'm close to being ready to write 
the code for this. i also think it sounds a bit more complex than it will 
appear from the outside; in fact, the complexity is to hide as much from the 
outside as possible.

with that piece done, DataEngine should be ready for a TechBase tutorial. 
yeah!

i've also got Animators, the plugins responsible for transition effects, 
basically working. i have to finish instrumenting Corona to use all the 
possible effects and to round out the set of effects, but this will happen 
over time.

i really need someone to work on the default animator so that i'm not working 
with / around my own assumptions. i suppose i need to do some API docu first 
there though ;)

mouse over frames for applets, panels and actually getting plasmagik merged 
are up next.

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

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/panel-devel/attachments/20070610/dbe6a22d/attachment.pgp