Qt Kinetic + Plasma Call For Ideas / Project Plan

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday 28 May 2009, Akmanalp, Mehmet A wrote:
> Hello All,
> I'm the gsoc guy who's working on integrating QT Kinetic effects into
> libplasma. Here's a preliminary project plan and a roadmap:
> http://docs.google.com/View?id=dfscskwm_121fdhzq7dn

cool; welcome to plasma :) i really look forward to seeing the results of this 
project.

in your project plan you have:

"Set up project hosting."

i'd highly recommend working directly in kde's svn. that makes it easy for 
others to access your work, for instance.

most SoC students create their own workspace under branches/ and you're 
welcome to branch kdelibs/plasma as well as whatever widgets you're working on 
(or even all of kdebase/workspace/plasma and kdeplasma-addons if you wish :)

if you need an SVN account, don't hesitate to get one:

	http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Get_a_SVN_Account

> Here's what I want to know:
> 1)What default effects would people want? With what default values /
> durations? Some ideas I had:

the ideas are all good, but i think that if we simply create a list we'll run 
the risk of creating animations nobody really needs and missing animations 
that would be really useful to have.

so, i'd suggest picking a handful of widgets that would benefit from 
animations (or already use them) and start working on practical effects in 
them.

for instance, there's no "flip" in your list, though that's a natural effect 
to want when one looks at the picture frame plasmoid. "flipping" the image 
over when clicked to show the "back" (just another QGraphicsWidget, obviously 
:) with detailed information about it is something we'd obviously want.

so working with real world widgets and tricking them out to the maximum will 
probably give us a really nice set of real world animations to work on.

some good targets imho are:

* picture frame
* comic strips
* weather
* tasks
* rssnow

these either all have animations already or else could really use them.

> 2)How much of kinetic to expose? Do we want to expose it at all? My
> opinion is that the aim is to keep the API as simple and easy to use
> as possible, so we should only expose specific animation functions.

exactly; we want a set of descriptive animations that people can apply to 
things without worrying about the actual dynamics.

> If anyone wants to do anything more complex than what we have to
> offer, then they'd have to use kinetic directly. This is the simple
> solution. Any clever ideas on how we'd allow more extensibility?

for now, i think this is fine. i don't see us creating a better system than 
kinetic within libplasma without duplicating large amounts of its api.

what we should be striving for in libplasma is a set of stock animations that 
people can then use very easily, and what we should be striving for in our 
widgets is cool and efficient effects using either the stock animations in 
libplasma or by direct use of kinetic for more advanced things. 

and as we identify commonly implemented "more advanced things" we can add 
those as stock animations.

-- 
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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