Plasma Applet Direction

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 14 January 2009, David Baron wrote:
> 1. Folks seem to be posting applets on kde-look. This is for eye-candy,
> decorations, screen savers.  Applets that treat useful information belong
> on kde-apps, I would think.

we (plasma team) don't actually control that =)

> 2. What to show? Seems to be a trend of plaster large screen areas with the
> whole kit-and-caboodle. Very quickly, there is no more room. Why do I need
> three days (count 'em) of weather forecast covering a percentage of my
> screen real estate? Same with network stats and system info.

because a lot of people want that. fairly simple =)

in any case, now that we have PopupApplet, it would be a nice time to work on 
being able to collapse applets into their Popup form even when on the desktop, 
perhaps via an icon in the widget handle.

> 3. KDE3 panel applets/services I STILL use because they have not been
> ported: knemo, ksensors. There was also a system-monitor (four of them
> posted on kde- look are not as nice), kweather, kisa (cool live
> spell-checker), and others which will not work or not function correctly in
> KDE4. 

kweather is unecessary; just put the weather widget in your panel.

system monitor widget is in addons now, and the ones with graphs work just 
fine in the panel (could use some more tweaking and beautifying, but are just 
as fine as the kde3 ones already)

the only one in your list that i don't think is really there is a kisa 
replacement. that would be beyond trivial to write, though.

> Would love to see (or participate in) their port to KDE4 (not just
> getting off dcop but going over to provided data-engines).

kicker applet -> plasma widget is essentially a rewrite of the applet. 
fortunately, they tended to be fairly small.

> What is distinctive about these is that they present (even a small!!) icon
> on the panel which shows a useful bit of information (which sometimes I can
> choose). If I want more, I hover over the icon or click it and then I have
> access to everything. Examples of current KDE4 applets that work this way
> are kget, kmix.

.. and the device notifier, kickoff, weather, battery, networkmanager, system 
monitor widgets, clocks, calculator, folderview ...

btw, kmix is a system tray icon, not an applet (in kde3 or kde4)..

so.. yes, i don't think the landscape is quite as you describe it. there's 
lots of room for improvements and new widgets to be written, certainly.

-- 
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 Qt Software

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