applet browser widget: the icon and the info

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hi ...

the icon for the applet is off to a good start ... the look of it should 
harmonize with what is in krunner, folderview, etc. we have an item background 
svg ... in fact, we even have a Plasma::IconWidget that take care of most and 
maybe even all of the painting.

the info widget is also a good start. the info button in there is cool too. 

one thing that becomes evident is that we do need that screenshot. this means 
some support in libplasma, i think. this screenshot will need to be an image 
file on disk.

for widgets that come in a Plasma::Package, this is easy to get. for c++ ones, 
we'll need a standard location for the screenshot to live. 
$APPDATA/plasma/screenshots? they can be named after the pluginName() with a 
png suffix. we can even make this available perhaps through 
Plasma::Applet::package(). it would fall back to the icon if there is no 
screenshot available. then we just need to spend a couple hours screenshotting 
everything :P

hm.. maybe ... i bet i could do up a little app that would run the applet and 
save out a screenshot for us. it could rip through all the c++ applets and do 
this for us. if an applet needs config, it would check that, wait for it to be 
configured and then save a snapshot. that way creating snapshots would be a 
matter of running this little app and watching it do it's business, 
configuring something every so often (once configured, though, the applet 
should retain this through to the next run :)

(i can write the above for/with you, as i'm supposedly the maintainer of 
libplasma and i don't expect you to fix _everything_ in plasma as you go ;)

so, does the above make sense to you? basically you'd be able to take a 
KPluginInfo and get out a screenshot that you can assign to the icon and then 
pass into the info widget. in fact, the model can provide access to this for 
the icon/widget.

ok, so .. now the placement of the info widget is a bit awkward. it mostly 
works in dolphin because there's a bunch of info shown there and moving focus 
from a file to the info doesn't seem mentally like such a big deal.

for the applet browser ...... not so sure :)

so here's my suggestion: let's use clickable Plasma::ToolTips. mouse over the 
applet and you get a tooltip. want info, click on the info button in the 
tooltip. this will work _really_ nicely if the icon list is in a horizontal or 
vertical list.

thoughts?

-- 
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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