Current Animations Poll for QT Kinetic + Plasma

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Tuesday 02 June 2009, Alexis Ménard wrote:
> 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)

and looking at those same widgets, imagine what kind of animations would be 
useful / cool to have (e.g. the image frame flip-over)

> > So, apparently, people don't use a large variety of animations at all,
> > and don't chain them parallelly.

the lack of chaining is because we don't have an easy way to do it. there have 
been several times we've found places it would be cool to chain a couple anims 
together, but it's too much work just to try something out that may not look 
good at all.

> > 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.

i think that's pretty much it: if it's not easy enough they won't do it. 
animation is seen as a "nice to have" not a "must have" and so it gets 
"budgeted" by developers pretty tightly. we have to make it very simple to get 
animations in play.

> > When this layer
> > makes it upstream, more people might take notice of its existence and
> > decide to use more animations.

i think so, yes.

> (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

the point of Plasma::Animator is not to make it easy to extend or to provide a 
generic animation framework, but provide a set of easy to use standard 
animations.

the "one line, you have an animation" concept is extremely powerful and really 
the only want to ensure that we see animations as pervasive as possible.

kinetic is great, but it's a bit too complicated to expect casual developers 
to use it. it's great for the non-casual developers who want to do extra cool 
things and for us to build a set of animations on top of fr the casual 
developers.

-- 
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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