KDE framework 5 - a humble idea

[Kevin Krammer]

On Wednesday, 2013-09-18, Marco Martin wrote:
> On Wednesday 18 September 2013, Michele Andrea Kipiel wrote:

> > i asked myself a simple question: what do i need on my desktop? what i
> > came to realize is that i could really use a desktop which acts as a
> > connection point between the hundreds of apps that live on my hard
> > drive.
> > 
> > current plasmoids act as discrete information bubbles (weather, rss, im,
> > social feeds etc..) and threy don't communicate with each other, which in
> > my opinion hampers their usefulness. in other words: what would happen if
> > KDE added a common backend to connect all the plasmoids (i'm thinking of
> > something similar to what elementary OS is doing with contractor)?
> 
> As Mark already said, this is mostly implementing meaningful actions for
> drag and drop on every plasmoid where it makes sense, and this is an
> orthogonal problem to actually "communicating with each other"
> 
> now would be needed to be defined what "communicating with each other"
> means.. does a folderview plasmoid need to know a picture frame is here
> too? if yes, what it needs to say to it? is it needed an api?

I think one way of improving drag&drop based workflows is to indicate possible 
drop targets when the drag starts.
With traditional drag&drop the users have to try where they can actually drop 
whatever they are currently dragging, i.e. the potential drop target says 
whether it will likely accept a drop at the current pointer position.

Given that the Plasma engine knowns all currently running Plasma applets, it 
could also be aware of all accepted dropdata types for each of them and, e.g. 
fade out those that can't do anything with the object currently being dragged.
Or even on hover or when an item gets selected.

> right now plasmoids by themselves are designed to be as sandboxed as
> possible, in part for security in part for lack of use case for doing
> otherwise.

Data could be transferred through a mediator, e.g. in the drag&drop scenario 
that is the system service providing drag&drop communication (in X11 the 
Xserver).

Cheers,
Kevin
-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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