omg, icons! oh wait, that's not exciting.

so we once again have pretty icons in plasma. they are a layout management compliant graphicsitem that supports loading an icon by name or by passing in a QIcon and which can be themed with an svg that contains some or all of the following element:

• background
• background-hover
• background-pressed
• foreground
• foreground-hover
• foreground-pressed

this should give us some nice basic buttons and allow us to theme them decently and flexibly. this should not be confused with animating effects and transitions (e.g. between hover and pressed or whatever), that's for another purpose-built animations class.

i'm toying with the idea of a chroming class that dress up things like icon buttons itself and pass off to the animation class ... but i think at this point that would be way overdesigning things. =)

in any case ... i'll be swapping out the icon list in krunner to replace it these icons. i'm waiting on a new sliding display widget that asiraj started on yesterday before i go and do that, however. then things should be really slick in krunner.

the icons in plasma will serve a few purposes; one of which is to serve as a FormFactor transition piece. what do i mean by that? well, imagine you have the application launcher interface (in kde3, that'd be the venerable kmenu) on a panel somewhere. you drag that off the panel and onto the desktop. on the desktop, it will expand to show the whole contents of the menu. if you drag it back off the desktop to the panel, it would show the button again which would have to be clicked to pop up the menu.

next i'm forcing myself to address the question of exactly how i want plasmoids to be aware of constraints such as their current FormFactor. i have a few competing ideas in my head; they have been competing for months. i figured eventually one of them would tire of fighting and go its way calmly into the night, or that one of them would grow nasty fangs and tear the other one's throat out. but alas, they are both survivors. so i have to actually intervene and pick a solution and implement it. as stick and carrot, i'm not going to let myself work on the other pieces i'd like to be working on right now until this "detail" is behind me.

meanwhile, milliams has continued working applet creation (drag and drop is now supported), ruphy continues to pluck at the clock, and the raptor menu guys are rumbling again.

what, no screenshots or screencasts? nope. the icon button stuff is actually pretty funny right now because the iconbutton.svg is a debugging image which produces humourous results from a use perspective but which was just about perfect for me debugging things.

if you want to see some really nice screencastcandy, check out rivo laks blogs on kwin's composite effects here and here. wicked cool stuff; congrats to the kwin developers (yes, i'm looking at you lubos! =). given that the new integrated composition manager development only started relatively recently with relatively few developers working on it when compared to other similar efforts out there, i'm very impressed with what is there already.

p.s. if you haven't been watching the progress on api.kde.org, you really should go take a look. they are pretty well done working on it for this iteration, and i have to say it looks really, really nice. props to winterz, danimo and ade. =)

*hugs*