Applets - to maintain aspect ratio, or not?

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Tuesday 08 January 2008, Alex Merry wrote:
> Lots and lots of people have told me this is (a) annoying,

if these people actually sat down with the various applets and thought about 
future use cases as well (yes, i know, two things people rarely do; that's 
why we're here and they aren't) they'd realize that for while there are few 
applets for which maintaining aspect ratio is a real deal breaker (the 
taskbar is one, btw) there are *many* for which not maintaining the aspect 
ratio is not really even an option (analog clock, power manager, image 
viewer, icons and comics to name five obvious ones; i stop at five only to 
preserve some brevity here ;)

perhaps what we need in Applet is a setPreserveAspectRatio method that 
defaults to true which lets the applet determine what the default resize 
behaviour is.

there is no one size fits all here and i really don't want to make the user 
determine which is which all the time on their own. in this case, Ctrl would 
be used to override this setting (so free resize for aspect constrained 
applets and aspect preserving resize for free resize applets).

> (b) not easily discoverable and

i have a patch that adds tooltips using QGraphicsItem::setTooltip to the 
buttons but the tooltips suck ass and the Plasma tooltip just isn't 
appropriate for this either. but making it discoverable is not a problem.

> (c) completely inconsistent with just about every other 
> gui element (think windows, for example).

that's never stopped us in plasma before ;) if our goal was to be consistent 
with every other gui element, we'd not being trying to do anything new. 
obviously, breaking with 'tradition' for no good reason isn't good, but it 
alone is not a good enough reason.

-- 
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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