PlasMate ~ UI and other stuff

Michael Rudolph michael.rudolph at gmail.com
Sun Oct 18 20:39:12 CEST 2009


On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 18:22, Marco Martin <notmart at gmail.com> wrote:
> not sure about making it an overlay: has it enough "value" to be always shown
> or can be usually hidden and shown only when needed?

Hi Yuen Hoe, hi Marco,

I don't think the preview should always be shown.

If the preview feature were really, really good, it would still also
be a distraction. Writing a plasmoid and testing it are two separate
tasks or steps in the work flow, so it would be best to also separate
them in the user interface.

But I hold, that one can't even get such a preview feature into the
"good" state. For various reasons:
- It would have to be "live", which means constantly saving and
reloading and puts an unnecessary load on the system.
- It's not obvious how to preview a data engine or a runner. (not
really a big problem)
- For most plasmoids previewing doesn't make much sense, they need to
be "pre-interacted with", which further supports the claim, that
writing and previewing are separate tasks.

An additional advantage of not always showing the preview is that the
user interface won't be that cluttered.

michael


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