KDEREVIEW: nowplaying dataengine and applet for plasma

[Alex Merry]

At Monday 11 February 2008 00:32, you wrote:
> i'll leave it up to you whether or not you want to translate your keys, i 
> guess, but know that it will cause English text to appear in UIs in the 
> future for people running non-English desktops.

I'll ask the translators about the translation system, and whether they would be able to make sensible translations without the context (ie: (a) whether the knowledge that it's the nowplaying data engine is enough for them and (b) whether gettext will get confused at runtime).

> 
> > > * providing a "help" source is interesting. perhaps we should make that
> > > standard, though really ... that's for people designing widgets, isn't
> > > it? it's not particularly for the actual usage of the engine.
> > > documentation is an unanswered question with engines, and it would be
> > > good to provide a better way to do this that doesn't involve having to
> > > open up khelpcenter either.
> >
> > That's on my TODO list for 4.1.  For now, it provides a way of people
> > getting the doc without reading the source.  Once we have a better way,
> > I'll probably scrap the "help" and "properties" sources.
> 
> ... well, again .. i wonder if we shouldn't make that a common practice. some 
> common way to get help out of the engine as to how to use that specific one. 
> what it does, what it offers, etc.
> 
> i'm about to do the same with runners so we can expose the syntax they 
> understand.

I don't think it should be a source, though.  What if there was a music player called "help"?  This is obviously unlikely, but consider the dictionary engine...

Perhaps some other API would be good.  Then there could be a help browser, like plasmoid viewer.  And even a help applet.

Alex