smart translation (qt interface)

[Anders F Björklund]

Antenore Gatta wrote:

>> What are the main differences between a plasma widget and the
>> system tray icon* ? Is it just that you can drag the indicator
>> out from the tray area, or does it offer any other advantages ?
>> * http://launchpadlibrarian.net/38518665/smart-ksmarttray4.png
>
> A plasmoid can be resized and moved, can have text field in it or
> whatever we need.
> So for example we can re-write a plasma version of the QT/GTK GUI, and
> when we do an update we can see inside the plasmoid the output of it.
> You can think of it as just a fashion, but the KDE team is pushing a
> lot on it for a reason in particular there is no longer a distinction
> between panels (like the taskbar), desktop icons, and widgets; they
> are created the same way.

Ah, OK. So it's not so much as to improve the old "update indicator"
(whether it's a tray icon or an applet) but to provide more features
from the "main" interface in alternate forms such as a desktop gizmo ?
(or widget or plasmoid or desk accessory or whatever the name du jour)

The current one only provides two things: a way to start up smart,
and something that indicates whether any new upgrades are available.
Those part shouldn't be hard to make available as a widget as well,
the code is much shorter now (in python) - it "just" needs a design ?

Looking at http://www.kde-look.org/index.php?xcontentmode=70x77x78
there doesn't seem to be any shortness of design alternatives... :-)

> Plasma separates components into "data engines" and their
> visualization counterparts. This is intended to reduce the total
> programming effort when there are multiple possible visualizations of
> given data; and to make it easier for the data engine and its
> visualizations to be written independently.
>
> So to rewrite the taskbar is something that will be needed soon or  
> later.

I think you will need to provide more details on the alternative
visualizations, if wanting to extend the interface rather than
just porting it to different toolkit (which was the current goal).
Another _small_ change is adding a groups view, see Bug #387289 ?

>> [...]
>> The plan is to update them to utilize Qt 4.4+ and GTK 2.16+,
>> but that doesn't mean much besides having to rewrite stuff...
>
> Agree, but has to be done, isn't it?


Right, but doing so doesn't really change much in the interface...
The appearance is a bit nicer, and it uses newer library versions.
(so that you don't need to have any "compat" versions around for it)
Actually changing the interface, that's a different discussion ?

--anders