Getting into plasma

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On March 15, 2010, Christophe Olinger wrote:

first, sounds like a cool project, and welcome to Plasma and KDE development 
:)

> *Should I learn Qt quick for this and do all this in declarative?

QML is still a long ways from being ready and is only part of 4.7 which we 
don't require for building yet (which means far fewer people who could test 
and patch along with you). i'd recommend against it in this case for now. in a 
year the answer might be different :)

> *Should I use plasmalibs as basis for this or start it as a new qt
> (kdelibs) app?

using libplasma will save you a good amount of effort and ensure it blends 
seamlessly with plasma-*

> *Should this be a C++ plasmoid 

i think so, yes.

> that I can later tie to a new
> containment to make it fullscreen?

the media center is already working towards such a containment (and, for that 
matter, the plasmoidviewer essentially is one as well :).

> *Should I code this as a new containment type? like SAL or newspaper
> and this would be picture viewer?

as Marco said, Containment probably isn't the right way to go. he didn't say 
why though, and here's that part of the answer: a Containment's reason for 
existence is to manage the layout and basic user interaction of plasmoids in 
it. your viewer will be viewing images, it won't be managing plasmoids. a 
Containment can manage mixing your viewer with other plasmoids. ergo, a simple 
Applet is the way to go(tm) here.

> *Could I do this with a javascript plasmoid? I guess not easily

probably not currently, no.

> *Should a start with gwenview as basis? and add a new viewmode to gwenview?

this would probably be a lot more work with little gain, so i'd recommend 
against it.

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