Current Animations Poll for QT Kinetic + Plasma

[Alexis Ménard]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 11:31 PM, Akmanalp, Mehmet A <makmanalp at wpi.edu>wrote:

> Hello,
> As a result of the previous discussion [0], I set out to see what all
> the current plasma apps (in svn) were doing in regards to animation so
> I gathered some data simply by grepping for customAnimation through
> their sources [1], then checking out what they were doing.
>
> In short:
> 7 fades
> 2 slides
> 1 expand / contract
> Not many chained together!
> (Keep in mind that a sample set of 10 a)
>
> So, apparently, people don't use a large variety of animations at all,
> and don't chain them parallelly. One example of parallel animations I
> spotted was the rssnow app, where when one news item slid out and the
> other slid in. Another was the pager, where you can slide your mouse
> over several desktop icons and they will all keep fading at the same
> time, although this is more the "fire and forget" type of animation
> aseigo was talking about.
>
> Anyway, maybe the reason for scarce use and lack of variety in
> animations is that people can't / are too lazy to (not in the bad
> sense) write animations, so they simply opt not to. When this layer
> makes it upstream, more people might take notice of its existence and
> decide to use more animations.


First because before you add to create a QTimeline manage it, connect
signals and so on and not reliable with lot of animations. That was not
really easy. Second, QGraphicsItemAnimation is not a very good API. Third
(my POV), i always though that Plasma::Animator was a bit too complex to
extend, but it opened the way and when in Qt Software we did the Animation
API, we took that guy in consideration :D. Perhaps with a more easy to use
animation and state framework people will start to use it. Sub-attaq example
in master is way to combine state chart diagrams to fully create a game and
couple that to animations.


>
>
> So, obviously, it looks like we need a fade effect :) But taking into
> consideration what I just said, it might be foresighted to add a
> little more. I'll pick and play around with some plasmoids to see what
> else could be added to them.


If a set is created and easy to use, then for sure widget 3rd party hackers
will use it. Look anne-marie and the picture frame...
One more thing is that we can integrate those animations in plasma widgets
(i mean pushbutton or whatever). This can bring some cool visual effects
like a kinetic scrolling for a list view. But be carefull not to much...lol


>
>
> Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?
> --
> ~ mali (http://constant.inople.net/)
>
> [0] http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/2009-May/005927.html
> [1] http://blackwater.constant.inople.net/gsoc/usage.txt
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