Extender tutorial on techbase

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Tuesday 09 September 2008, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> http://reviewboard.vidsolbach.de/r/145/
> and corresponding thread on this list with subject:
> "Review Request: PopupApplet iconify patch"

because people will make the wrong decisions. in the submission for 145 it 
says:

" For example kickoff's is always shown when put in the desktop while it would 
be nicer to have it "iconified" as it happens in the panel."

like many things Plasma, this is one of those things people don't "get" right 
away. why would you want a launcher constantly *iconified* on the desktop? the 
entire *point* of having the menu on the desktop is to have a launcher 
visible. 145, essentially, misses the point.

so ... how to do it properly. well, your goal is to :

 * allow the applet to have its own paintInterface.
 * allow the applet to not expand on the desktop

 i can see a few ways of doing that, but perhaps this is the easiest:

have popupapplet support a null icon being passed into setIcon, which will 
cause it to kill it's own icon. at that point, you are quite free to 
reimplement paintInterface or instantiate your widget.

the trick would be to only paint / create them in the "correct" FormFactors, 
but that's not rocket science.

this also provides a solution to "allow the applet to not expand": if no icon 
is set, then PopupApplet can simply not switch away from Plasma::Dialog. 

this preserves the "iconified in Vert/Horiz, expanded in Planar" pattern, it 
allows for the clock to use it with no extra effort and it even allows people 
to have an icon on the panel and on the desktop by jumping through a bunch of 
hoops.

so unlike p145, this approach would make the 2 things we want to encourage 
easy and the thing we don't want to encourage tricky but possible without it 
becoming hackish.

-- 
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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