So I finish out the Plasma::Package support and
blog about it. At the end of that, I email Sebastian saying I'd like to get Superkaramba supported in the same way as Mac OS Dashboard widgets, especially since Superkaramba is a lot more "native" to KDE in the first place. My email is sent off to ask what the mimetype for Superkaramba packages are. But before he reads my email, Sebastian has already gone crazy on the ScriptEngine front and done all the work. I see his efforts pour through on the commit list. The result is equal footing for Superkaramba in a very visible manner, as you can see here:
So now as a user you can load your favourite SK widgets, and as an SK developer you can continue to utilize your knowledge of SK theme creation. Even better, you can use things like Plasma DataEngines in your 4.x SK themes, and now we can load them from files in a nice user-friendly manner. (Sebastian also covered off some UI details in the dialog before I could get to them!)
I love it when a plan comes together. =)
13 comments:
Just a minor nitpick -- though I expect you already thought about it: for the user those packages/themes/dashboard widgets are the same. Could some mime-magic detection spare the dialog we see on the screenshot ?
i mentioned that in my last entry on this topic, actually =) we don't have the mimetype detection right now for all supported widgets, so we use what we have (which includes mimetype support), but for 4.2 i want to research (and hopefully develop) pure mimetype detection loading and thus avoid the first step =)
The most evil thing was, that I discovered your nice blog just after the job was done :-/
Sometimes it really helps to check mails and browse the dot before starting to code something, heh.
Nice work, all!
Can SuperKaramba widgets even be resized and rotated like "standard" Plasma widgets?
"Can SuperKaramba widgets even be resized and rotated"
all supported widgets can be.
"all supported widgets can be."
Just FYI: this is mind-bogglingly awesome :)
Finally, a chance to ask this question I've wanted to ask for so long:
I've always wanted to try developing my own SK themes ever since I discovered SK. I was particularly amazed at the level of complexity that some themes were able to achieve, given the technical limitations of SK (LiquidWeather and Kuartet come to mind). But I had to learn a whole new language just to be able to do that. And then news of Plasma (in the original Plasma website) came out.
My question is: now that Plasma is here, what are Superkaramba's remaining "benefits" (or relevance, if you want)?
(Other than being able to load older SK themes, of course.)
The "Install new widget" dialog looks a bit crowded with 5 different buttons at the bottom.
In a wizard you ideally should only have 2 buttons: "Back" and "Forward". Of course we know in real life things get complicated and you want the ability to cancel at any time ("Cancel" button), and then some "Help" button. But couldn't we at least get rid of the finish button? "Forward" should become "Finish" once you arrive at the last step.
I would also leave out the help button and end up with a clean total of 3 buttons, but maybe that's just me.
What do you think?
> remaining "benefits"
See that nice list of good reasons.
So, that multiple scriptengines are supported is imho a good showcase how flexible the plasma architecture is :)
can superkaramba "plasmoids" use SVG too?
great news!!!!
People complained about Plasma being slow in the making, and blah, blah, blah. This has been the case for sometime now, but the "stubborness" has paid off in dividends in regards to velocity.
It'd be really neat to see a Plasma burn-up chart, just to see how dramatic this trend is. Of course, that'd mean sizing up bugs, and then querying bz to pull the data and generate a chart. And all of that assumes, things go into bz before they get done.
"can superkaramba "plasmoids" use SVG too?"
sure they can, just use them as normal images. for special features for svg images look up the api on techbase!
Just a minor nitpick:
Is the heading on that dialog (Qt-subapplication) going to be changed at some point? IMHO the heading "Install new widget from file" should be displayed there instead of where it currently is (it should be the heading of the dialog box; i don't think an average user would care if its a Qt-subapplication or not). This would also make the dialog a bit smaller.
(i think i've seen that in other dialogs too, not just this one).
Anyway I know you've got a lot on your plate at the moment, and its hardly a major issue that we can't live with. Only I haven't seen anything written about that yet (although obviously i might have missed something...)
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