Questions about Plasma Activities

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Saturday 22 November 2008, Jesse L. Zamora wrote:
> 1. Why does Plasma slow down so much when you zoom out to see the
> activities? 

because it does all the scaling in software. that == slowness.

> Is there any way to increase the performance?

not doing it software. qt 4.5 is probably when this will be available to us.

> 2. Why doesn't it have the capability to just click on the activity you
> want to zoom in to it? I find that clicking the cashew is somewhat
> burdensome.

clicking on the activity would mean you can't interact with them when zoomed 
out ... that's not what we want. it's a little bit of magic behaviour.

the plan (for 4.2 even) is to hide the cashew when zoomed and instead show a 
"control bar" beneath each containment with some basic action buttons. not 
unlike the panel controler in that way.

> 3. Why is the background the color it is? The transparent
> checkered box background looks, well, it looks unpolished.

it's a simple, fast to paint background that says very clearly "this is blank 
space". it's common in other canvas based apps that users are more likely to 
be famliar with: drawing and painting apps.

when it wasn't that checkerboard people would ask what was going on when they 
zoomed out, what happened to the background, etc.

so i put clarity over beauty in this case.

i've thought about a gradient, but that would be a rather unecessary abuse of 
horsepower imo ... i've though about putting a default wallpaper there but 
that stands a really good chance of making the activities harder to see.

-- 
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 Qt Software

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