kde look?

yokem55 · Guru Joined: 18 Apr 2002 Posts: 360 Location: Oregon

AWESOME!!!! Thank you for all your hard work!

quarus · n00b Joined: 12 May 2002 Posts: 39

@TomorrowPlusX:
Do you know that there is already a Slicker Project going on ?
slicker.sourceforge.net

Excuse me if i sound stupid, but i didn't saw your nick in the forums.

TomorrowPlusX · Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2002 8:55 pm Post subject: I had no idea...

I didn't know -- I just scoped it out. Looks like they've thought out the functionality pretty well. Question, then, is are they writing any code?

I'm going to have to get in touch with them, but, frankly, I'd rather be writing code. My worry is that they're dreamers -- looking at how much they've thought out the look. I could be wrong, of course.

zez · Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2002 9:57 pm Post subject: Re: Progress

quarus · n00b Joined: 12 May 2002 Posts: 39

TomorrowPlusX · Posted: Fri Dec 13, 2002 7:57 am Post subject: OK screenshot time ;)

Hey all, I have a screenshot for you guys:

http://home.earthlink.net/~zakariya/files/carddesk.png

I don't have widgets loading into the card area yet, and I have a few drawing artifact problems (mainly due to fast and furious QRegion clipping -- you can see it on the card named "Yow!"). But the important part is:

1: Cards slide around screen corners, can be snapped near one another and drag-dropped onto eachother to make decks. They can also be re-ordered by dragging them along a deck.

2: Cards can be snapped open/shut.

3: Framework is in place for plugins to draw icons/change text/etc/etc into the "tab" region and in general override the look. Framework is also (almost) in place for embedding any kind of QWidget into the card.

So, let me know what you think! Like I said, however, earlier in the thread, there won't be antialiased curved edges due to limitations in X.

This weekend I'll start working on making a plugin framework.

metalhedd · Posted: Fri Dec 13, 2002 5:33 pm Post subject:

Can you post a link to a tarball? I'd like to take a look at the source and maybe play around with it, try to get familiar with it. it will be my first kde programming experience

TomorrowPlusX · Posted: Fri Dec 13, 2002 6:05 pm Post subject: Tarballs soon

I'll post a tarball soon, possibly this evening. Before I do so, however, there are a few things I need to do:

- fix some redraw flickeriness; too many redraws are occurring when dragging a stack of cards, due to hasty logic I pulled out of my ass at 230 am last night.

- Put in a tiny eensy weensy touch of eyecandy, namely psuedo dropshadows -- I just made a mockup of my intents for this evening during my lunch break:
[img:101a1e641f]http://home.earthlink.net/~zakariya/files/mockup.png[/img:101a1e641f]
I'll implement these for real tonight. Btw -- the pixel artifacting/region bugs I solved last night before I went to sleep, but after posting the screenshot. Funny, how you can be brushing your teeth and still catch a bug.

- make sure widgets embed properly. Ought not be a problem, but I want to make sure this is rock solid before I start writing a generalized plugin framework.

- and finally, make a slightly more generalized (and thereby more easily subclassable/reimplementable) appearance framework.

Then I'll post tarballs. But I have to warn you, if this is your first jab at kde programming, you might find this a little peculiar. Knowing C++ is great, but Qt/KDE are odd (albeit, beautiful) beasties, and I'm making HEAVY use of their peculiarities ;)

metalhedd · Posted: Fri Dec 13, 2002 7:11 pm Post subject:

well i'm not sure i'll be of any help, i at least want to see if i can compile it and make afew minor changes, try to get my hands dirty. I've read alot of QT/KDE programming Documentation, so we'll see what i can pull out of my ass.

vod · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 10 Jun 2002 Posts: 90

sweet.
keep up the great work.
It must be fun implementing this

Bytal · Posted: Fri Dec 13, 2002 8:26 pm Post subject:

Love to get the source code too if you don't mind

With the tabs you could theoretically have the clean screen of fluxbox but with much higher usefullness then just clicking the desktop
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TomorrowPlusX · Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2002 5:28 am Post subject: One more screenshot

It's late, and I probably should stop coding for the night, but I want to post a screenshot of the way it looks now:

http://home.earthlink.net/~zakariya/files/carddesk/carddesk1.png

The shadowing I showed in the mockup this afternoon is implemented & works, all the redraw problems are solved (as far as I can tell ;) and best of all, it's faster than before (there were many unnecessary redraws earlier).

Sheesh.

Anyway, I'll post tarballs soon -- but not until I have a basic framework for inserting contents as well as the api for custom tab-looks implemented. The last thing I want to do is release even a 0.0.1 version if it's half baked. Please have patience!

TomorrowPlusX · Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2002 5:28 am Post subject: One more screenshot

It's late, and I probably should stop coding for the night, but I want to post a screenshot of the way it looks now:

http://home.earthlink.net/~zakariya/files/carddesk/carddesk1.png

The shadowing I showed in the mockup this afternoon is implemented & works, all the redraw problems are solved (as far as I can tell ;) and best of all, it's faster than before (there were many unnecessary redraws earlier).

Sheesh.

Anyway, I'll post tarballs soon -- but not until I have a basic framework for inserting contents as well as the api for custom tab-looks implemented. The last thing I want to do is release even a 0.0.1 version if it's half baked. Please have patience!

jonemi · Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2002 8:26 pm Post subject: Re: One more screenshot

jcmkk · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 May 2002 Posts: 124

TomorrowPlusX, great work so far. I love seeing someone actually get the ball rolling. That was my biggest concern. I really think that you should let the slicker team know though. At least give them a link to this thread.

jonemi · Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2002 11:19 pm Post subject:

I was just about to send links to this thread to the slicker mailing list (slicker-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, BTW) but I didn't know if Tomorrow wanted me interfering.

phong · Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2002 5:29 am Post subject:

I've moved this out of Desktop Environments to Chat, as it's not a support question. There was also this thread that popped up, which now resides in duplicates.
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TomorrowPlusX · Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2002 7:38 pm Post subject: I'll get in touch soon enough

I will get in touch with the sLicker team, soon. The thing is, this is a somewhat complex mechanism (more so that is immeidately clear) and I'd like to have a fairly solid foundation before people start poking around in it.

I'm a big believer in group participation and open source, but I also feel that for some projects, it's good to have one person (or a very close team) work on it by themselves until it reaches a solid foundation point, before others are let in.

The code base right now is *very* unstable, from an API standpoint. I'm changing base classes up through the top level classes constantly as I work to acommodate unforseen problems. This isn't a good time for me to let the code out and start managing patches. I've already performed one complete rewrite/refactoring to handle some complexity which never occurred to me in the beginning.

Now, on a side note, until about one hour ago when I broke something badly :P I had some good new functionality:
1: radically ddifferent sizes of tabs can be used, and stacked (with group preferred sizes used to determine a deck width)
2: animated sliding open/shut (you need a good graphics card, btw, because X just isn't right for that kind of thing)
3: embedded widgets into the card contents work, quite well at that.
4: I've refactored the appearance api to make it easier for a custom card to display itself in its own way.

jcmkk · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 May 2002 Posts: 124

I wasn't really saying that you should release the code to them yet, but just that you should let them know that you're working on it so they don't do a bunch of building on top of someone elses code before they look at yours to see which is better. I think it is good that a couple of you are starting the base because then they have some options as to which code is a better foundation.

mb4guns · Guru Joined: 04 Dec 2002 Posts: 300 Location: Netherlands

Tumbs up! The whole slicker idea is wonderfull, clean, friendly, inviting, handy and most of all cool looking. If u keep this up we might be looking towards new kde standard

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quarus · n00b Joined: 12 May 2002 Posts: 39

TomorrowPlusX · Posted: Tue Dec 17, 2002 3:24 pm Post subject: Update: & Good news

All
As of last night I have finally stomped out a truly annoying redraw bug I was having, wherein if a card deck was on the right or bottom edge of the screen, and one of the cards was expanded/collapsed, there would be NASTY flickering while it animated open/shut. Solved!

Anyway, I'm struggling with a few usage/conceptual problems but making headway. In my labors to make user-friendly drag positioning/reordering of tabs (successful, I might add), I had lost sight of programmatic positioning (think card->setPosition(...)) and last night I hammered at the code to make sure both are in line. It's getting there. Now, if you were to make three cards in the same screen position, they'll automatically stack. Sounds obvious but when you're working as hard and fast as I am, it's easy to lose sight of something that should be fundamental.

Finally -- I'm beginning to sketch out in my head a plugin framework and what I've decided on is to go for MAXIMUM binary compatibility for plugins by having the plugins implement a pure virtual class and all negotiation from plugin to card is done via signals. This seems to me to allow for the card classes to be changed, drastically, behind the scenes, even in BC unfriendly ways, but the plugins ought still to work, since they won't need to be linked against anything but Qt & KDE!

charlieg · Posted: Tue Dec 17, 2002 4:03 pm Post subject: Sounds absolutely class

You really need to get this online, where it's at slicker.sourceforge.net or as a separate project.

I can't wait to get testing on it. Hopefully you'll not be making it KDE-ised, so it'll be cross DE and cross WM.

I'd love to have this on waimea.

Maybe even a dockapps card!
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jufoa · Posted: Tue Dec 17, 2002 4:23 pm Post subject:

that looks really cool

Zues1 · n00b Joined: 17 Dec 2002 Posts: 1

Great looking app, and a good Idea.

Do you have any plans on having this on gtk2+

I dont use kde nor qt when I can help it, but I am liking how all of this is starting to take shape.