PlasMate ~ UI and other stuff

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On October 22, 2009, Michael Rudolph wrote:
> The "disadvantage" would be, that there's no preview area next to his
> editor. But it seems it would only be a picture of the latest
> save-point anyway.

right, so that you can play with it and work on the code at the same time. 
having to switch back and forth, particularly when in the middle of coding 
when you want to check what it was doing exactly, is going to be really 
annoying.

i actually used plasmate last night (including made a couple of commits ;) 
and, yes, it was extremely annoying.

> The advantage would be, the whole window can be used to display the
> plasmoid and therefore the possibilities for testing are much greater.
> This might not be an advantage in all situations, but it's also not a
> disadvantage.

With a toolbox you can tear it off and expand it as well. 

but now you're talking about using tabs and having them simultaneously 
available so that one can have both the editor and the previewer live; that 
might work out fine as well, but I'd like to retain the ability to have a 
preview beside the editor or outside the window itself.

> Collapsing the preview dock, like you suggest, sounds like a solution,
> but I'm really not in favour of it. Because it means the user would
> have to manually manage the toolbox window. With a tab bar it's much
> easier to make plasmate context-aware, so it reacts to what the user
> is doing and can present appropriate options.
 
the problem is with the definition of "appropriate options". i am constantly 
going back and forth between the plasmoid as it currently is and the code as 
it currently is and making changes to the code. after some number of changes 
then i restart/reload the plasmoid and test again.

a great example was the javascript animations example i was working on last 
night. there was a problem in two different areas of the example, and i worked 
on one after the other before reloading the widget. after fixing the first 
issue, i looked back at the plasmoid that was still running to re-orient 
myself as to what the second issue was exactly then went back to fixing that.

when i can see both the plasmoid and my code i can bounce between them quickly 
and naturally. 

when i can only see either my code OR my plasmoid, i'm hindered in doing so.

so if there's a tabbing system, great. but i don't want to see it end up where 
one can only see the code OR the plasmoid. that's simply inane.

-- 
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 Development Frameworks
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