Plasma Applet Direction

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 16 January 2009, Marco Martin wrote:
> what about giving a dbus interface for all of this, like background 
> settings and use this for setting stuff from another process?
> (for background settings would also be needed a list of activities and have
> a dialog per-activity, dunno if it could be overkill as an ui)

two issues with this:

*  i don't think we can make it perfectly seamless in all situations unless we 
keep the containments very simple in what they do so that we can have mostly 
static configuration dialogs with basic widgets

* how does the user map what they see in this dialog to what's happening; 
there's a reason i like the immediacy of things like applet handles: it's 
obvious what you are acting on. with N activities, of which you can only see 
2-3 of without zooming out, you'd have to hold the model inside your head. 
this is far too abstract for most people, i'm afraid. it makes sense to us as 
developers, but we have a deep model of the structures in our head.

worse, i don't see how to map this to applet arrangement or how to explain to 
people why some containments don't have any settings, etc.

no, one of the principles of plasma is contextual, immediate interaction with 
objects.

it's the same reason we don't have a separate dialog for the panels.

747 cockpits versus a drawer full of pens and paper. both have a lot of parts, 
but i'd only trust most people with one of them. ;)

-- 
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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