(experimental) KWelcomeDialog December 28, 2010
Posted by tumaix in planetkde-tomazcanabrava.trackback
or KWelcomeWidget, don’t know what to call it yet. it’s made with Plasma KPart, translucent to be pretty’n sexy ( nuno wanted to hit me, but… ;D )
the code is in playground/libs/KWelcomeWidget, not a lib yet, but an test app. needs a new slot on plasma/kpart to work, and a Plasma::DataEngine that’s also in playground/base/plasma/dataengines.
well, enougth of talking, screenshoot.
before anyone asks why does it have buttons in the background, it’s just a test app to show what I was doing. 😉
Live Blue 
Sorry I’m a bit confused, what is it for?
It’s an widget that shows ‘Create New Projects’ and ‘Open Recent Files’, to help visualize what the app has to offer while they just opened. it takes over an widget area and places on top of them like an overlay.
the “don’t show this dialog again” label goes almost unnoticed.
true, and that’s a bit of problem with the theme used. already talked to Nuno Pinheiro from the Oxygen Team about a plasma theme for applications since quite a bit more will be using now that there is a KPart for it.
Hello, can you explains the benefits for using something that is plasma based ?
mostly, being plasma based makes it have subtle animations, that are not easy to do by using normal QWidgets, since they were not made for that. I know that the layout is not the most prettier one, that’s easily explainable by me being a coder and not a designer, but I plan to make it preattyer as it gets, without losing the focus to the usability. ( any usability expert to help me there? )
That looks nice, would it be something standard in any app that support projects? or only in apps like kdevelop, etc
that’s the main idea. I developed it as a lib to use it in rocs, and since I know that there already quite a bunch of apps that uses something similiar to it ( but every app have it’s own implementation ) I decided to make it usable from any app.
I don’t know about the plasma theming here. The text background glow kinda hampers the reading flow.
the text background glow is plasma-theme 😉
I like the idea of having a standardized way to handle the “blank state”, ie what appears when one starts the application for the first time.
I am not sure using Plasma is a good idea though: it forces a dependency on another library for all applications using this widget and it blurs the line between applications and the workspace (I always assumed Plasma did not use Oxygen widgets because it was the workspace, not an application)
I talked about nuno of using plasma on it, and he also think it’s a bad idea. I started using plasma because of the subtle animations and cool look. I’m gonna do a version of it without plasma since Nuno pratically forced me that 😉
Perhaps this is easier said than done but instead of completely removing plasma from the dialog you could make it an optional dependency.
I personally feel that not using plasma/phonon/solid/whatever in certain programs because it blurs the line between those two domains is the wrong way to go. After all, they’re the pillars of kde4 and were developed to be used and to make the life of the devs easier. Just saying 😉
Good idea daniel. I’m gonna just do some #ifdefs in my code to make it possible to have it without plasma for those who want it whitout plasma. I personally think plasma’s amazing piece of art & tech, and I’m tempted to do applications fully with it to see what’s gonna happen.
Totally agree. Not only plasma but All of KDE tech is amazing, that’s why I sometimes don’t understand such severe restrictions (if only ethical) for it’s use.
If you really want to try such an app you should really try, I’m pretty sure that’s how Plasma Media Center was born. If you do try, I’d be glad to help with what I can 🙂
I believe the Oxygen artists decided to create an appearance for the workspace and another one for desktop applications to ensure the two domains are not confused.
WHY DO YOU KDE DEVELOPERS HAVE TO EMBED PLASMA IN EVERYTHING?
plasma is a lib build on top of QGraphicsView. it’s sexy, it has a beauty, it’s stable and has smooth animations and translucency. I see no problem of adding it to everything. but of course it needs to be well-tougth to not become a frankstein mess. that’s why it’s *experimental* 😉
I don’t think using #ifdefs is a good design approach. Just add one more level of indirection in terms of interfaces/implementations and then you have those two concerns decoupled.
>sexy, it has a beauty, it’s stable and has smooth animations and translucency
>translucency
And that’s why it is not suitable for this.
sorry, I *really* didn’t get your point. care to comment a bit more?
Plasma -1, there is no need for plasma here in each case because there are KDE applications not using plasma, but this common idea would be useful. Therefore it is a bit silly idea to use plasma just for one class.
As discussed last night, you are not against its extension with a QWidget way, thus it is just the question of time when it is gonna be available 🙂
Thank you for your great job, anyway!
this is no reason for them not starting to use it.