4.5 - Activities

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On March 9, 2010, todd rme wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 9:44 PM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> >> The critical thing here is that containments have to rescale the
> >> widgets they contain depending on the monitor resolution.  Otherwise
> > 
> > this is both containment-specific (not all containments follow the same
> > layouting strategy) and orthogonal to coordinating containments and
> > contexts. it would be interesting to see work done on this, but it's a
> > different project touching different parts of the code base altogether.
> 
> If someone did this, would you accept the patch?  I described a

sure; i'd recommend doing it as a proof-of-concept first in a new Containment 
plugin, so that it isn't bumping into existing layout code. it would make it 
easier to test and work on strategies.

for testing, i'd also recommend using something like plasmoidviewer: a simple 
one-window app that is a Plasma::View which loads a Corona and this new 
Containment. it could then have some controls on it to change the size of the 
window to different common screen resolutions (maybe a toolbar with some 
buttons?). this would allow easy testing, and shouldn't be more than a hundred 
or so LOC.

if it proves workable, then we can merge those strategies into the existing 
relevant containments, such as Desktop and Folder View.

there is a very real upper limit on what can be accomplish here, though, 
through simple rearrangement. going from 1900x1200 to 640x480 is an absurdity 
and with enough widgets to cover a good portion of the higher resolution it 
just won't be possible to fit them in the lower resolution.

bouncing between two resolutions will similarly get annoying if it means 
constantly re-arranging the widgets (e.g.: you move from large res A to small 
res B, then you move around and resize some widgets, then go back to res A.. 
what happens? if the positions/resolutions are saved per-containment-geometry 
then those moves will be lost. just one example of the difficulty here.)

perhaps a solution is to just hide or put into scrollable region widgets that 
don't fit well.

or perhaps the desktop layout could use an anchor style layout with the ratio 
to the edges or other landmarks being used.

it's an interesting research area, and i'd certainly encourage you to explore 
it if it interests you.

> you can end up with many of your widgets mostly-off screen

while this can happen with FolderView, i don't think this should be possible 
with DefaultDesktop.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
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KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks