Kickoff-qml

[Rick Stockton]

On 10/22/2012 10:16 AM, Marco Martin <notmart at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
> one thing i would like to have merged for 4.10 is the qml port of kickoff.
> i have been looking at it past few days, and it seems to have most of the
> features, even tough is still quite rough, i'm not 100% sure it may be ready
> yet.
> i've fixed some things in last couple of days, it still has some layout and
> painting problems (sometimes elements don't seem to repaint correctly)
> right now even if not really far i don't think is really merge-able yet.

Thanks for the invitation! I'll be delighted to serve as a tester, 
although my ability to code is so limited that you probably DON'T want 
me to try any coding. ;) If Kickoff-QML doesn't make it for 4.10, then 
I'll port my 4.9.3 fix forward to kickoff-widget 4.10. But for now, I'm 
hoping that Widget-QML takes over.
> also the code organization doesn't seem to be that great (it has a quite
> complex logic and there is a context menu copy in each delegate that makes
> things quite heavy)
>
> i think it should have a minor refactor on how the various pages are managed,
> a qml file for each page (favourites, applications, leave etc) and one single
> contextmenu for each page.

Just to re-emphasize: the 'Applications View' has had recurring 
difficult problems WRT keyboard-only usability: Once you ENTER the view 
content, via down arrow, you cannot LEAVE and get back to the searchBar 
text area by doing the reverse (i.e., Qt::Key_Up). In Widget-Kickoff for 
9.3, I have fixed this by checking the rowIndex when the Key_Up is 
received : if it is already zero, then instead of leaving the parent 
behavior (sit there and do nothing), I send a signal to the parent 
'launcher', indicating that focus should be changed to the searchBar.

I REALLY have no idea how the QML and C++ parts "connect" in 
Kickoff-QML. There are signals, but repainting the QML-based UI ???

A while ago, when I said "Just use Qt::Key_Tab, it's the standard for 
switching keyboard focus between widgets", many bricks were thrown in my 
general direction. If we want feature parity, we need to handle key 
Up/Down as well. (I do see that Gregor already added the "Switch to 
'Favorites' if Key_Left is pressed while already in the left-most column.)
- - - - -

On a different topic, https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=308824 shows 
a really ugly desktop (IMO) with kickoff-qml too "transparent" over a 
background image. IIRC, Widget-Kickoff was completey opaque on white 
background: it looked much better.

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