taskmanager project

[Christian Mollekopf]

On Monday 02 February 2009 12:07:18 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.
This was my intention as well but unfortunately i had my issues with the 
gridlayout and stopped therefore working on it.
My idea was instead of destroying the LayoutWidget on collaps of the group,
to change the layout direction (horizontal to vertiacal, or vice verca) adding 
it to an offscreenWidget and showing it then in a popup on mouseover or 
mousclick. 
This will make sure that we still have the drag'n'drop functionality with 
grouping and sorting and the look is consitent.

Unfortunately there are some problems with this idea.
Since the LayoutWidget isn't a real layout but rather assigns one to the 
groupitem and the actual layout is recreated on every geometry change,
it's not yet possible to accomplish the above thing easily. 
Also showing another GroupItem instead of just a normal widget with layout 
didn't work for me.

Therefore i tried to work around this issue and did some testing with the 
QGraphicsGridLayout without much success so far. 

I didn't want to demotivate you though, 
good luck =)
> (2) left-click peforms bring to front/minimise/restore action on whole
> group 
> (3) right-click context menu remain the same
>
> ...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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