The future (or lack thereof) of Desktop Icons (Was: [Bug 156428] dragging to desktop creates a link without notifying user)

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 23 January 2008, Christopher Blauvelt wrote:
> - Have the alignment algorithms include all applets.  This is now easily
> done with the new alignment algorithms which allow icons of any size.

yes, this probably makes sense in general. there will be those who will want 
to align their various widgets. would be nice to make that easy for them and 
you've already really put in all the work to provide that. no point in that 
going to waste =)

> - Have a folder view applet.  I'm not exactly sure what this is supposed to
> do.  What features are implied by such an applet.

view contents (in a list?), open in a full file manager, support dropping of 
files (copy, move, etc), open and delete individual files in the folder. i've 
always imagined this to be a single icon with the name next to it and an 
expander arrow; when clicked it would expand to show contents within.

> - Adding device icons to the desktop.  I would like to see a device
> dependant applet for different devices.  ie. A blank CD-R will open up a
> "folder view" applet which allow files to be dropped and when you're done
> press the burn button.

this sounds like something the devices applet should take care of. a device 
appears and it should give various options, including creating a widget for 
it.

> - The ability to minimize Applets.  This could be done with a button on the
> applet handle.  The resulting icon could be changed dynamically by the
> applet depending on conditions.  Examples are the weather applet could
> change the icon depending on updated weather conditions, etc

this is in part what form factors are for. however, to iconify applets and 
make them continue to be useful .. it might tricky to do this in a generic 
fashion.

one option might be to simply tell the applet that they are now in a 
Horizontal formfactor.

still, it would be really good to first sit down and define the use cases and, 
most importantly, the reason for each use case. then we can design something 
that meets those use cases rather than simply support what is otherwise an 
interesting but random feature =)

> - Iconify applets when the view is zoomed out.

yes, this is part of the idea of semantic zooming: level of detail. it would 
also probably help us scale better performance wise when zooming. the place 
to do this would be in Applet::paintWidget.

-- 
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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