smart translation (qt interface)

[Antenore Gatta]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 12:34 PM, Anders F Björklund <afb at algonet.se> wrote:
> 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 ?

In fact I was thinking to change the interface, to have a new
"--plasma" (??? or --interface=widget ), for instance...

I'll work before on the Italian translation and then I'll think a bit
about this and I'll come back with my proposal.

Agree?

>
> --anders
>
>