Tale of a little pixel

Widgets party

A target i have for Plasma in KDE 4.2 is to have a set of widgets that integrates nicely with the Plasma theme to be reused across multiple plasma applets.

We need this to minimize the amount of code required to write a fully functional applet, and also we need them to be well integrated with the Plasma theme, they must be as fast as possible and look as good as possible. So (at least for the most common widgets like the buttons) we need to reimplement them as pure QGraphicsWidgets that will be SVG themed as the other Plasma elements.

Now i have mostly finished two widgets the first is a generic button with a nice halo around it that appears with a fade in effect when the mouse pases over it.

The other widget i'm writing is a tabbar also SVG-themed. The first place where it will be used will be the weather applet as you can see in this beautiful sneak peek by Nuno.

When the active tab changes it slides to the new one and also the page displayed changes with a nice sliding animation. These two widgets for now lives in playground but i hope to move them into the main trunk for general usage as soon as possible. here is a video that shows the animations of both the button and the tabbar, the last part of the video shows quick switching of tabs with the mouse wheel.

More decent Ogg

system or not system

the first version was reimplementing everything from scratch, maybe a bit exagerate (more from an api point of view)
now i'm experimenting with proxy widgets that paint the widget by themselves. it's better that they have their own look for two reasons, one because they look really alien on plasma themes with a style and colors that may or may not be coherent with the style and color of the plasma theme.
but most important qt themes are really limited, they have all the measures in integer, so for instance when rotated rounding errors makes them to look really bad
and they are clipped, so it's impossible to make cute effects like the halo around the button (unless nasty nasty hacks)
said that maybe it could be a theme config that says to paint with the native look, so themes where it makes sense can use that.

Sent from Marco Martin (mart) on 21/07/2008 at 10:22:57

consistency

In order to do the plasmoid I show in my blog I would use qt tabs right? Humm and then to make them match I would use a plasma theme that looks like the qt theme in use lets say in this case Oxygen. So basacly the plasmoid would look just like any other window, and now what would we need plasma for???
Plasma IMO is great anser to try new things that we simply cant in qt theming. I should know that.
Another rather obvious question is what if your favorite qt theme is plastic or keramik should plasma provide themes for those aswell???
As Grósz Dánielsaid this is about consistency, can some one explain-me the consistency of that??
We are putting a lot of effort into making plasma default theme and qt oxygen theme more consistent but does not meen making them the same I think that would be wrong what would be the point of plasmoids then?

Sent from nuno pinheiro (Anonimous) on 21/07/2008 at 3:47:56

A theme that uses the system widgets

I absolutely agree with Kevin Kofler. Even if you want Plasma widgets be able to look differently (although I don't see why they should look different than normal widgets), please make a theme that uses the normal widgets so that if someone prefers consistency (over eye-candy) can use the normal widgets.

Sent from Grósz Dániel (Anonimous) on 21/07/2008 at 2:58:49

And they all look bad

Kevin Kofler yes and??? they look bad IMO completly out of place, the anser is the to theme them with css but im not sure you would be able to pull the slider tab with animations like that....
If the idea of plasma is partly to provide anew canvas for unthemed qt widgets sory but i dont see any point on having the plasmoid you could do it in a kwin window.. no??

Sent from nuno pinheiro (Anonimous) on 20/07/2008 at 23:08:49

System widgets

Argh. we finally got the capability to use standard Qt widgets in Plasma in 4.1 and now you're throwing them away again for 4.2. :-( I really don't see why Plasma should use different widgets than a regular window, this leads to an inconsistent UI. IMHO Plasma should use the same widgets with the same themes as standard windows, and Qt 4.4's WoC feature makes that easily possible.

Sent from Kevin Kofler (Anonimous) on 20/07/2008 at 19:33:20