applet browser: laying out the applet icons

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hi...

(last one for now ... )

so, next up: the layout of the applet icons.

right now they are in a 2D grid. if they are in a linear list then the eye can 
traverse in one direction only, but there are bigger wins to be had!

with a linear listing we can then take this widget and put it _right inside_ 
the PanelController widget. so when the user clicks "Add Widget" in the panel 
they get the PanelController but with your interface in it. it becomes _very_ 
clear what's going on to the user and we avoid the "panel view goes away 
unexpectedly because i click 'Add Widgets'".

for the desktop, we can just throw up a very simple panel style widget at the 
bottom of the screen .. if there's a panel down there, it would even pop up 
the panel controller for that panel in add widgets mode. if there is no panel 
down there, just throw up this custom widget. this is trivial work and, again, 
something i or someone like me can put in place for you so you can continue to 
concentrate on the Add Widgets interface instead of learning how the plasma-
desktop shell is put together ;)

this will also work nicely in a netbook interface, and i can even see it 
working nicely on a small phone like interface where you can pick widgets to 
run/activate by paging through such a list.

all the control "chrome" (search widget, category picker..) can appear above 
this listing. the category picker will be the tricky bit, i think. but we can 
discuss this more later (i think i'm already probably flooding you with input 
here.. sorry :)

finally ... in the situation where we have multiple categories showing, i 
think it would make sense to lump applets of similar categories together.

this would end up looking sth like:

Category 1 						Category 2
-----------------------------------------------\    --------------------------
Applet Applet Applet Applet Applet     Applet Applet Applet

the category label would be done in KGlobalSettings::smallestReadableFont() 
and the lines would obviously be the thin plasma lines we use everywhere.

the Applet is, probably obviously, the full AppletIconWidget

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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