Participation in GSoC 2013

[amanjot singh]

On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 3:00 AM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:

> On Wednesday, March 20, 2013 23:29:51 amanjot singh wrote:
> > It isn't fully developed yet, so I wanted to submit a proposal for the
> same
> > to make it a fully functional and a usable widget.
>
> What are the use cases you have in mind for this widget?
>

The main use case would be the "Create new.." facility that you mentioned
later in your mail, allowing users to create files without having to open
the base application program and following the usual steps.
It can also act as a template manager for applications that don't provide
one.
As of now I can think of only these two use cases.


> Also, have you worked on this, or other KDE software, since SoK?


> > The main goal would be improvement of the user interface, the widget
> uses a
> > file dialog, instead a list of available templates would be developed
> > showing their title, author, date of creation and other information.
>
> The existing widget is very pretty, and a nice list that appears when an
> item
> is selected would be an improvement, yes. Have you given thoughts as to how
> this might look?
>
>
Yes, I have been working on this throughout the year. I was trying to
replace the file dialog with a list of templates with information about
them extracted from the meta.xml file in the template archive. This
included making a new model-view architecture, using tree view for the list
etc. This all is included in the "experiment" branch of my repository.

I have successfully created the list and the UI, but it comes in a
plasma-enclosed window of some sort and it's look is inconsistent with the
look of the main widget. I searched for a solution, someone suggested to
turn the "windowIsDecorated" to false. But that made the list stick to the
main widget and immovable.

So as of now I'm trying to make the list appear in a Plasma::Dialog (like
the spell check widget) rather than being displayed independently inside a
plasma enclosed window, as it matches more with the appearance of the main
widget. But that is turning out to be a pain because I'm having some
implementation issues with the model and the dialog appears all solid and
gray in color, unlike the spell-check widget. Though I copied the code for
the plasma::dialog from the source code of the spell-check widget.

The widget, according to me, should be consistent in look and feel, the
list would be displayed after one clicked the corresponding button, with
buttons for opening and closing a particular template and the list
respectively. The list should be movable since if otherwise if the user
clicked different buttons in the main widget, different lists would pop up,
immovably stuck to the widget and it would all be a mess.


> Also, your current widget uses QGraphicsView widgets, which makes sense for
> when it was written. Have you done any work with QML yet, as that is what
> have
> been moving to.
>

Um, nope I haven't done any work with QML, I have been developing in C++. I
guess I could learn that.


>
>
> Another thing that would be added is a preview button that shows the
> > preview or thumbnail of the files in the list.
>
> this can probably be done by default witha button.
>

Yes, that would be useful. But I haven't found any such functionality in
any plasma-widget, so I tried making buttons for each template and display
the thumbnails in the template archive. But it wasn't that successful,
would have to work on it again.


>
> > A standardization of the folder where LibreOffice stores templates would
> > have to made for the widget to work properly on every system.
>
> afaik it exists: $PREFIX/share/templates
>
> > After this is developed, the widget will be extended to work with
> multiple
> > application programs,  allowing the user to create and open files and
> > templates of the types not supported or not present in LibreOffice.
> > Would like to ponder on any more suggestions on the development of the
> > widget and comments on my direction of development. :)
>
> We have need for something similar in Plasma Active .. a "Create New..."
> app
> that would offer such templates. It would need to support all the
> applications
> that can create documents on the system, even if they don't have templates,
> but it's easy enough to extend the extant design with.
>
> --
> Aaron J. Seigo
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>
>
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