Extender tutorial on techbase

[Marco Martin]

On Tuesday 09 September 2008, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> 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:
i'm still thinking could make sense to give applet a function like 
showExtender() that makes a popup (and forcing to use extenders instead of 
something else), i see like two different things, like an applet that Has a 
popup vs popupapplet that is an applet that Is a popup
and the popup function in applet could look differently in the panel or in the 
desktop, the clock for instance could look something like this http://nuno-
icons.com/images/estilo/image590.png

could make sense to have both this approach and the popupapplet existence?

Cheers,
Marco Martin

> 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.