applet browser: laying out the applet icons

[Marco Martin]

On 6/29/09, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> 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'".

the panel controller is about 100 pixels high (don't see how to make
it smaller) adding the pab directly here (without repacing it upon add
widgets button press) would make it 200-250 pixel high, wouldn't eat a
bit too much space?

> 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.

yeah, it must be reusable in different shells (but they all must
reside in workspace so? atm for testing i had to copy the sources of
the current pab in plasma-mid nogood(tm) :)

> 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.

having a list of toggle buttons that permits to check an arbitrary
number of categories?

> 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
>
>