taskmanager project

[Marco Martin]

On Monday 02 February 2009, Casper Clemence wrote:
> Hi all. I am starting out hacking on KDE and I wanted to check that I'm not
> stepping on any toes.
>
> I've never used Qt or kdelibs before and I have a full time "day job" so I
> might take a while. Anyway I hope I can be useful and not just a pain. I
> will do some bugfixing I promise, but I think I'll learn better by trying
> to implement some design.
>
> What I'm working on is the "workspace/plasma/applets/tasks" task-manager.
> In particular the grouping behaviour.
>
> AIM:
> (1) on mouseover (of a group item) a taskbar-like widget pops out showing
> the members of the group it's behaviour and appearence is the same as the
> main taskbar.
> (2) left-click peforms bring to front/minimise/restore action on whole
> group (3) right-click context menu remain the same

not sure i agree on opening the menu on just mouse over, would bring a ton of 
accidental opens and maybe a bit annoying
that said, making the group menus look like a real taskbar it's a thing that 
definitely was on the todo list, i recall christian started to work on that 
but i have no idea if there were any progress... (anyways, it basically means 
open a Plasma::dialog with a view in it that displays the group in a vertical 
layout)

another thing i see is that there are really many ideas around the taskbar, 
about behaviours slighly different one to another (someone also started to 
work on a win7 like dock), instead putting a garzillion of configuration 
options i think it should be done a libplasmataskbar like there is 
libplasmackock now for the garzillion of clocks

Cheers,
Marco Martin
> ...I hope it's clear what I mean :)
>
> JUSTIFICATION:
> (1) Using a taskbar-like widget rather than a visually different menu means
> the user does not have to switch her mental model and should therefore be
> more intuitive: doesn't "make the user think".
> (2) Makes the mouse interaction more consistent: left-click on a window
> item brings that window to the front, left click on a group item brings
> that group to the front.
> (3) means that bringing forward a window that is part of a group or a whole
> group both require one click not two, as they do currently.
>
> If you think this is stupid or it likely conflicts with something that is
> already being done, let me know.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Casper
>
>
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