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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: New special effects library
From:       Zack Rusin <zack () kde ! org>
Date:       2006-12-19 11:40:49
Message-ID: 200612190640.49697.zack () kde ! org
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On Sunday 17 December 2006 02:07, Robert Knight wrote:
> Very cool.  I think we need a better name for this stuff  "KImageFX"
> is so KDE 3.x.  Perhaps we could pinch the Apple naming scheme (with a
> common prefix, they use "Core" although we couldn't do that obviously,
> followed by the area which the library relates to, eg. "Hardware",
> "Audio", "Effects") - this has a couple of advantages, it would tell
> you immediately that the library was part of KDE and what it does.  If
> you get the prefix right it sounds cool too.

heh :) I think I kinda like KImageFx because it tells you what it's doing. 
Having a naming scheme for our core technologies would be nice and would 
definitely help new people finding themselves around the code but I'm not 
certain would it could be. I refuse to name a library with some silly fancy 
name though :) Solid, Phonon, Decibel... all pretty cool name but very silly. 
Silly because "cool" names are for marketing purpose for users. They matter 
for user presentable software - applications - Plasma.

It looks like we're trying to market libraries which in turn is pretty 
bizarre. Users don't care, or should never have to care about technologies 
under the applications they're using, so the existence of Phonon, Solid or 
Decibel doesn't matter to them. 
It matters to the developers of applications that those users will be using 
and in my experience new developers would appreciate a lot more having 
libraries names that give a clue about their functionality. "How do I add 
special effects in KDE? Use Wheepeeeeeeeeeee library. What about multimedia? 
Phonon. Hardware? Solid. Telephony? Decibel." At which point do you go "wtf 
were these people thinking?" =) 
So common naming scheme for core technologies - I'm all for. Fancy name for 
another library - after my dead body (and i'm working out a lot so it ain't 
gonna be easy) :)

> The design is neat.  I spotted a small flaw in the current
> implementation.  The provided effects work directly on the image of a
> layer, retrieved using layer.image().  However if the layer is created
> from a pixmap source then the underlying pixmap is not modified by the
> filter's apply method and so when you use layer.toPixmap() to retrieve
> the output you get the original input pixmap without the effect
> applied.

Yeah, the library is a week and a half old so it has a lot of unimplemented 
things :) I'll be adding things to it every time I have a little bit of spare 
time so hopefully within a month it should become very much usable/awesome.

z
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