Concerning the KDE 4 Digital Clock widget

[John Layt]

> On Saturday 13 February 2010 05:16:50 Maki Jaderborg wrote:
> > I was wondering if the digital clock widget present in KDE 4, which lists
> > you as the author, could be configured like the PHP date() option.
> > http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

I have been slowly looking at the config options in the digital clock for a 
while, but have yet to come up with a fully satisfactory solution.  We have a 
couple of outstanding wishes in bugs.kde.org against this already with very 
vocal users :-)

We basically need to balance keeping the clock config simple for the majority 
of users versus supporting our power-users desire to tweak everything.

KDE already supports the full POSIX date format standard in our date 
formatting API, which is very similar to that used in PHP.  However forcing 
the average user to learn and enter format strings like "%d %M %Y"is not a 
nice way to do things, and is prone to error.  In our Regional System Settings 
when setting the system date format we wrap this in an easier syntax like "DD 
MONTH YYYY" but that fails for the same reasons.

I did try an interim step where I replaced the current configuration tickboxes 
with a combo box which allowed you to choose between the system short date 
format and several standard variations show as examples rather than formats, 
but I was never happy with it as there were too many options listed.  I also 
tried a combination of a combo and tickboxes but that just felt clunky, and 
adding lots of tickboxes for each option gets messy and also has localisation 
issues.

I have blogged in the past about how OSX does it using a drag-and-drop gui 
widget (http://www.layt.net/john/blog/odysseus/a_challenge) and how we could 
do even better, but I've had little chance to take it further.

I'm open to suggestions :-)

Cheers!

John.