On Wednesday 28 November 2007 01:58:45 am Will Stephenson wrote:
On Wednesday 28 November 2007 05:55:00 Kai Ponte wrote:
On Tuesday 27 November 2007 20:34, Ben Kevan wrote: I can barely make things work - KNotify seems to want to crash every few minutes.
That's due to known problems with its xine backend, the community are working them though.
But I would love to hear your KDE 4 questions on this list.
Well, there's this black-bordered area towards the top of the screen. it seems to hold Clippy and Korganizer. I got rid of both from launching but there's still a black box. It wants to cover up this wrench icon hanging out in the top right corner.
That's the system tray - it's back in its usual spot in SVN now.
Hovering over it, I get three boxes - add widgets (which is blocked by the black box thingy), zoom in and zoom out.
If I click on zoom out, the picture on the desktop seems to shrink along with all the icons. The kicker panel sill remains.
WTF is that?
That's "Zooming UI". The idea is (and it's not finished yet) that you can define different groups of panels and applets/gadgets/widgets for different tasks, and zoom and pan between them. It's an extension of the virtual desktops model, but where virtual desktops are not just "more space" but also "different space".
Since we have a lot of flexibility in how Plasmoids appear and present themselves, you can specialize the desktop to particular tasks. For example, a media browser containment with no windows, but showing 3d effect previews of your photo collection and video playback. Or a slightly facetious example I've just made up is an 'Online Desktop' which I can switch to which has a large panel taking up the rightmost quarter of my widescreen displaying all my friends Twitters, Facebook updates, ebay auctions, rss feeds, and a 'fullscreened' browser taking up the rest of the screen and synced to the panel contents.
The Zooming UI is an attempt to provide a way for the user to switch between all these desktops and 'other interfaces'. I think whoever designed it plays a lot of realtime strategy games. When you zoom out, imagine the grey space is filled with other desktop and interfaces. It's obviously unfinished, however, and I don't know that it will make the cut for the final KDE 4.0.
Watch the video from last week's KDE Commit Digest if you want to know more.
http://commit-digest.org/issues/2007-11-18/
Techbase page: http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Plasma/ZUI
Will
-- Will Stephenson Desktop Engineer KDE Team
Great reply Will. I will finally be more excited about KDE 4 once the "task bar" is functional, or we can actually move plasmoids around on it (right now for me all the plasmoids are static). Can't wait to see how easily configurable the plasmoids are (again most importantly the bar since I am pretty specific on the size of the bar I want lol). Thanks for the heads up and the video was great and I hope I don't bug you guys with the bug reports i've been putting in haha.. Ben -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org