Help request on writing a plasmoid

[Rob Scheepmaker]

On Thursday 11 December 2008 19:00:30 Bernhard Mustermann wrote:
> So.. now my problem: Documentation is a bit suboptimal .. well.. who want's
> to write docu ^^ ... so I'm a bit lost on where to start ...

Yeah, the documentation could be better. But a good place to start is the 
tutorials on techbase: http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Plasma
Then just start coding and reading a lot of apidox. That worked for me when I 
started.
But we should definitely improve our documentation. I think we need a 
comprehensive 'quick start guide'  for starting developers. So much to do, so 
little time...

> I'll try to explain what I'd like to do and I'd really appreciate to hear
> your opinion:

I quite like this idea.  :)

> Design decisions:
>
> 1.) Would an extender be preferred and a good choice? What I think sounds
> nice may be docking one event-counter to the clock. Although I don't know
> if an extender can be iconified for the panel.

I think it's a very good idea (but hey, extenders were my summer of code 
project ;) ). If you use a PopupApplet, surprisingly much is done for you 
without you having to care about the details. Take a look at the extender 
tutorial to see how to use them. And don't hesitate to ask you extender 
questions to me, my name on irc is pinda. 

> 2.) As mentioned before the plasmoid should work in panels and on the
> desktop itself... maybe it would be nice that the bigger the panel grows
> the more information are shown.

certainly. :) Just track your size changes in the constraintsEvent and respond 
accordingly.

> 3.) another "problem" are the time zones -- different time zones/countries
> -- different dates -- think I'll have to find a solution myself.. don't
> expect anything of use to be in KDE for such a usecase ^^

There's a dataengine for that in plasma, which is used by the other clocks. 
Now that I think of it, it might even make sense to use libplasmaclock as 
basis for your counter. You'll then get timezone configuration for free. But I 
haven't looked much into libplasmaclock so I'm not sure how easy it is as 
basis for this specific usecase.

> 4.) Would themes be of any use? maybe for the basic events like Christmas,
> easter, ....

Yeah, you could provide a standard set of svgs for basic events, install them 
in the desktoptheme/plasmoidname directory, and this way allow plasma themes 
to provide custom images for your applet if they like.

> 5.) I think a dataengine would be the right way on separating the data from
> the view?

You mean, like writing an 'upcoming events' dataengine? I think that would be 
nice.

> I'm really looking forward on getting some feedback from you and I wish you
> good luck in polishing and ironing out the last bugs for the 4.2 release
> :-)

Welcome... and have fun exploring plasma :)

> Best regards
>
> Bernhard Friedreich