irc log of an interesting conversation

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Thursday 10 July 2008 13:47:42 Marco Martin wrote:
> On 7/10/08, Jared Kells <jkells at gmail.com> wrote:
> so what this thing matters to plasma? i don't really know, but perhaps
> there is a little common point.
> if plasmoids won't be seen as real apps (even if they somewhat are)
> perhaps it could be an advantage, because if we manage to do things
> right,  it won't be seen as scary as a normal app, less a "machine
> thing" and more related to real word things, that don't have menus and
> options and you can do a single thing with every objec

Yes. I tend to think that for a lot of people, small horribly inflexible apps 
are just what they want. It might make sense to have whole class of Plasmoids 
that do little more than translating URLs and displaying content from the web.

There would be a Wikipedia Applet (with Logo of course!), which would only 
prepend "wp:" to the string typed into a lineedit and pass it on to Konqueror 
(or maybe just use a webkit widget to display). Likewise for Google, IMDB, 
EBay or whatever people want to look up. I'm sure people will love it, because 
it's simple to learn. Luckily, it's also simple to write. A base Plasmoid that 
can be configured with two things -- the actual URL to be called and a logo -- 
would do the job. Everytime you discover a new website, you just create on of 
those plasmoids and users see it integrated into the desktop. If we want to go 
really crazy, we can add some stripping mechanism that removes some of the 
other content of the resulting webpage, so we can even make it fit into our 
plasmoids itself.

Also, I believe there are users around that are afraid to learn a new app, but 
aren't afraid of learning a new webapp. However strange that is (especially 
given webapps are often more clunky than desktop apps), I've seen this pattern 
multiple times.
-- 
sebas

 http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org |  GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 

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