GroupingTaskbar infos and questions

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday 04 September 2008, christian mollekopf wrote:
> Hi there,the groupingtaskmanager is in a fairly usable state now but there
> are still some issues left where i could use some help.What is working by
> now:-Everthing that the old taskmanger could do exept the show only current
> screen functionality and startup tasks-Automatic grouping by programname
> based on the name in Taskmanager::Task::classClass()-Manual grouping, this
> creates on change of the desktop a copy of the whole grouptree so all
> manually created groups can get restored on return to the desktop (only if
> showOnlyCurrentDesktop is enabled of course)-Automatic sorting by
> alpha-Manual sortingWhere i still have to work on and need your help:-I
> couldn't figure out how to find out if a window is on the current screen
> because the containment isn't available in the lib.

that's something belongs in the Applet (which has access to the 
containment()); libtaskmanager should simply advertise which screen a window 
is on (and probably take a flag to control whether it should care or not, since 
that's a relatively expensive operation)

> -I couldn't find a reliable source for
> the progamtype. As mentioned i currently use
> Taskmanager::Task::classClass() which works for things like opera or
> konqueror but totally fails on programs like vlc and its playlist.

i think that's mostly a failing of programs like vlc.

however, vlc's playlist should belong to the grouping; so calling 
KWindowSystem::groupLeader(vlcPlaylistTask->winId()) should hopefully return 
vlcTask->winId()

> -Expanded
> groups currently look really ugly. The first point is that currently all
> tasks in an expanded group are squeezed to fit in the room that one task
> has. I not sure if an expanded group that contains 2 task should use the
> place of two tasks, or just maybe 1.5 time the place of a single task.

that's a question for the art team ... 

> The
> expanded groups have a background in a specific color so they can easely
> distincted from other tasks. This is a fully opaque red,, yet. Since this
> looks awful we need some kind of colorpalette which looks nice and fits the
> current theme.

leave this up to the artists ...

> There porbably has to be a configuration dialog to choose
> between some palettes.

first sign it's probably not the best possible direction: you need to resort 
immediately to configuraiton for something like "colour used on a specific 
widget when in a specific state" =)

> Unfortunately i don't have a clue if there is
> already something like this.What else i intend to implement:-A
> configuration window where some group properties (name, color, icon) can be
> changed by the user. 

i'd recommend not bothering. let's have the artists come up with a concept svg 
for us to work from and then go from there.

the name should be the group leader's name, the icon should be the group 
leader's window icon. KISS.

> grouping by programbtw. both manual groupingstartegies aren't persistent
> over sessions since the Task pointer changes. I wonder if there is some way
> to recognize windows over sessions.

window class; take a look at how kwin does it in its per-window settings. it's 
not 100% perfect, but 99.9% is good enough here.

> About the sorting and grouping
> strategies:The only useful sortingstrategy for me is currently the
> manualSortingStrategy (for what i actually started this whole project =). I
> implemented the alphasorting to stress the api but it's actually rather
> annoying if a task jumps around just because the website (and therefore the
> name of the task) changed.

it shouldn't be alpha by window title, but by application.

> And i can't think of any situation where this
> would be useful anyway.

so i can go "i'm looking for 'kontact' .. it'll be somewhere before 'mplayer'"

> Almost the same for the groupingStrategies. My
> favourite is definitely the manualgroupingStrategy where i can group tasks
> according to the work i have to do.

understood; it's a really great exercise to try and get into the headspace of 
others. i wil likely never use manual grouping, but i can totally understand 
where you are coming from.

> i can't think of any further useful strategies. Would be great if some of
> you could come up with some cool ideas.

by Plasma::Context =) in another week or so we should have Nepomuk integration 
on the rails and then we can start playing with tagging windows.


-- 
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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