Icons only mode for tasks plasmoid

[Marco Martin]

On Friday 16 January 2009, Christian Mollekopf wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Jan 2009 19:36:31 +0100, Martin Gräßlin
>
> <kde at martin-graesslin.com> wrote:
> > On Friday 16 January 2009 19:15:55 you wrote:
> >> On Friday 16 January 2009, Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> >> > Please have a look at the attached patch and give comments on it ;-)
> >>
> >> before this goes in (and the patch looks ok at first read) i think we
> >> may
> >> want to step back and ask ourselves:
> >>
> >> "Do we really want a task bar that behaves exactly like the current task
> >> bar, except that it has no text?"
> >>
> >> - or -
> >>
> >> "Do we want a task bar that actually has the semantics of a dock?"
> >>
> >> if the latter, we ought to create a sperate widget. this new widget and
> >> the
> >> tasks widget can certainly share a lot of code and classes, but i don't
> >> think that shoving more and more options in and complicating the code
> >> more
> >> and more makes the most sense if what we really want is a dock when it's
> >> all said and done.
> >
> > Personally I would like to have a dock and of course I thought of a dock
> > when
> > starting to work on this part ;-) But first of all for me only icons
> > would be
> > enough for saving space ;-) I don't know how much work it would be to
> > get a
> > dock starting from the tasks widget. Most of the functionality of the
> > tasks
> > widget will be needed in a dock, too. Of course the quicklaunch
> > functionality
> > has to be added and saving the positions, etc.
> >
> >> btw, in the code, instead of doing the checkedState comparison, you can
> >> just do isChecked(). so much shorter =) checkedState only really matters
> >> for tristate controls.
> >
> > I just wanted to keep the code consistent to the existing checks ;-)
>
> Since everyone is now talking about a dock i just wanted to say that i
> don't like the dock at all(at least the OSX one..)
> I can't see any advantage apart from the fancy look and the quick access
> to some apps (which could be overcome with a simple
> quickstart applet placed next to the taskbar). Other than that i think it
> just takes away space from the taskbar which could be used to identify
> tasks.

just to throw ideas around, what about a dock that looks exactly as a taskbar, 
so with icons+text? maybe having the text or not would be the thing that 
distinguish running and not running tasks...

> But if you have some fancier ideas than apple, please let me know ;-)
>
> To get back to topic, i quite like your patch and from my pov we could
> integrate it (although i couldn't live with only icons)
> and will probably never use it =).
>
> What i don't understand is how you're able to distinguish between multiple
> windows of the same app.
> Since we want to have soon a popup showing real TaskGroupItems it would
> also not work with grouped windows.
> This has to be considered maybe...
>
> Regards