netbook reference, the polishing details

[Marco Martin]

On Friday 19 March 2010, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On March 19, 2010, Marco Martin wrote:
> > On Friday 19 March 2010, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > > hi all.... (and particulaly Marco :)
> > > 
> > > we pulled out P's old (first gen!) EEE PC and stuck a USB key with the
> 
> btw, i should probably note some specs: this is a 2 year old device running
> a Celereon M clocked at 630MHz with half a gig of RAM. "free" noted usage
> in the low 200MB range after a full usage (2 pages of widgets set up, sal
> used a number of times, etc)
> 
> > i'm seeing possibly other apps that would want a different space saving
> > setup in this case?
> 
> probably; so we need to find a way to set this globally. if only we had a
> kded plugin where we could publish such context type information to.
> 
> ;)
> 
> maybe we could add this to the activities manager? a bit of physical form
> factor information? it's not strictly activities related, shouldn't require
> nepomuk, but it is related to the idea of context?
> 
> otherwise, another kded plugin would probably Do The Trick. essentially a
> simple enumeration sitting on the bus with a signal for when it changes.

yes, to notice formfactor changes would be rocking(tm)
it's still a bit clunky saving eventual config changes to the defaults and 
restoring them back when the formfactor gets back

at the moment the workspace kcm keeps a backup of all values it changes

> > > * configuring the pages breaks the look and feel completely because it
> > > opens a "normal" dialog that fullscreens itself and so we go from
> > > pretty pretty pictures to the dull grey of a full screen qwidget.
> > > perhaps an experiment in embedding the dialog into the view (full
> > > screen still of course :) and setting a background translucency on it
> > > might at least improve things?
> > 
> > not totally sure, but te situation has to be improved anyways (it's me
> > single biggest pain when i think about plasma-mobile where this problem
> > would be 100 times worse)
> > giving the dialog a default applet background would look quite nice
> > perhaps. the danger in that is that with transarency you have to make
> > sure the palette is the plasma one, in dept for every sub widget or you
> > could risk invisible widgets (the krunner config ui styed broken for
> > months :p) but yeah, something has to be tried(tm)
> 
> how about, at least in the compositing case, a translucent background like
> the dashboard? leave everything else as-is, except maybe the window text
> color (which would need to be a contrast colour, obvoiusly). should be
> easier to pull off since it wouldn't be necessary to mess with the entire
> palette? it would also let one see the netbook UI in the background.

yes, it could be a way, i can try over a semitransparent widget in corona and 
as a composited window to see what seems better

> > > there are also an interesting assortment of minor annoyances, like how
> > > gwenview flickers something fierce when using the thumbnail bar to step
> > > through a full screen slideshow, or how the add widgets dialog
> > > sometimes appears as a window with window decorations but those are
> > > just "garden
> > 
> > talking about the add widgets dialog, @tokamak we talked about stuffing
> > it in the toolbox: i've tought about it, and while it would look way
> > prettier, it has the problem exaclt of being into a containment. since
> > the panel is locked, it's possible to interact with the tabbar with the
> > add widget ui open, so switch on the other pages: it makes sense so to
> > have the add widget ui as a different window, shown regardless of what
> > containment is currently active
> 
> that's fine; but the window appears with window decorations showing :)
> which makes it look very clumsy. i don't think that's the intended
> presentatin though.
ah, sometimes appears with sometimes without
i think it's again some windows flags set in the wrong moment ;p

-- 
Marco Martin