flowout proposal

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Wednesday 28 December 2011 16:18:06 Mark wrote:
> Besides that this is pure eye candy, it does make the desktop just look
> more polished when the menu folds out like that and just seems to be nicely
> integrated in the panel. This idea should imho be extended to more elements:
> - System tray
> - Thumbnail preview
> - Menu bars
> 
> Would it be possible to implement this idea in KDE?
>From what I see in the screenshots (I did not look at [3] due to the huge 
amount of advertisment on that page - maybe upload a video) there is nothing 
which is not possible right now with KWin. All the things are there. So Plasma 
is actually the wrong place for this :-)

So what you need is:
* a Qt widget theme to get the translucency (KWin 4.8 contains improvments to 
have windows always blurred)
* a Plasma theme
* a set of KWin effects (note: 4.9 will include JS bindings for effects and 
QML bindings for things like Present Windows)
* a KWin window decoration which supports the translucency (note: since some 
releases the decoration can paint the background of the window. I hope to get 
QML bindings to window decorations for 4.9)
* a set of Plasmoids
> Or let me ask it differently, what needs to happen in KDE to even be able
> to implement it in KDE?
> 
> Please do let me know what you think of it.
Whatever you do: do not even think about playing with the window system. 
Integrating windows into the desktop shell is a bad idea. Be aware of the 
limitations of the X window system. Be aware of the limitations of working 
with Qt, GTK and XUL. Your mockups show Firefox: you will never get it that 
way. Don't reinvent the wheel, use what is there.

Remember that we are in the process to get rid of X, but some things will 
stay: we still have different rendering in Qt and GTK to make your live 
difficult and even with Wayland we still need to differentiate between windows 
and desktop shell.

Cheers
Martin
> 
> Kind regards,
> Mark
> 
> [1]
> http://mde.mageprojects.com/images/MDE%20-%20Marks-Desktop-Environment%20-%2
> 0menu_paths.png [2] http://mde.mageprojects.com/
> [3] http://www.filefactory.com/file/c059a4b/n/AdaptivePanel.zip
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