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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    My Todo List ;-) (long)
From:       Mosfet <mosfet () mandrakesoft ! com>
Date:       1999-12-30 1:08:15
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Hi all, as you know there is quite a bit still to do in some of the
applications I am involved to some level with, so I thought I would post
all the big things still to do and see if anyone wants to join in
helping coding. The following is a list of apps and big things that I am
aware of that needs implementing. The list isn't complete, and I don't
go over small tasks that I will be doing. If you see something that
interests you please feel free to say something. I know I can be pretty
direct about how I think things should be done, but I have been getting
slowed down by doing things like tutorials and styles and can use the
help if we ever want these apps to get done ;-)

Kicker

1) Something that has been requested for a long time is that the
Personal and Global application menus need to be optionally combined in
the menus. Distributors especially want this, since they don't see why
the users should have two menus for apps. I kindof disagree with this
but it should be supported anyways. Combining the menus in Kicker is no
problem at all, but then they should be combined for editing as well. In
order to do this, the plan is to have an "Applications" view in Konq,
which will combine both directories for editing. You would access it via
something like apps:/ or applications:/. This probably needs to be a
view and not an ioslave because the applnks should be formatted as to
make it very clear what they can edit and what they can't.


2) Layout management is still not complete. This is mostly just tedious
work. The buttons are currently not really laid out at all but just has
some code that lays them out one after another. The applet area uses a
QLayout based layout system that is rather neat but moving still needs
to be implemented.

3) We need more applets, esp. internal applets like a toplevel taskbar.

4) Most the other tasks aren't a big deal and I can get to them but if
others want help that would be cool. This includes more Dnd, controls on
the QuickBrowser for a terminal and file manager window (with Matthias's
cool QPopupMenu allowance for QWidget items these can be really neat
;-), KPager needs more work in order to work with KWin and when that is
done KMiniPager will pop it up when you click the arrow (that is what it
is for ;-), KoolClock and Kasbar needs more features, and the menu class
should parse more .desktop keys.

KWin

KWin is actually coming along nicely. I am currently doing some more
stuff for this which you will see soon, mostly concerning some new
styles and better defaults so you don't have to manually set color
schemes before switching styles (ie: System, Next, etc...). Otherwise
it's looking good to me.

KControl modules/Theme manager

I got this for Kicker and KWin so don't worry about that. A concern I do
have is that our way of configuring the look and feel of KDE really
sucks ;-) We have color schemes, widget styles, widget themes (which may
override color schemes), KWin styles, and old KDE1.x KWM themes. A big
ole mess scattered all over the place, and very non-intuitive since some
settings affect others. I think it would be nice to get rid of all those
and make the primary interface something like the theme manager. On the
first tab you have a list complete styles that contain color schemes,
widget theme/styles, and kwin theme/styles. So if you select "KStep",
the window manager, widget style, colors, etc... all change to a Next
like interface. Even things like kicker can switch from the taskbar to
the Kasbar iconbox. Then you have further tabs for manual color scheme
configuration, wallpaper, etc... 

All in all very similiar to the theme manager, but I think it should be
the *default* interface, ie: what you get when you select Display
Properties. /me ducks the flames now ;-)   

ImageMagick and Image Viewing

As some of you may recall a long time ago I wanted to use ImageMagick as
a base KDE library. This got stalled because it's really hard to do
efficently. We have QImage->XImage->Image Magick Images that all need to
be converted. Not what I was looking for. We can skip some of the
overhead by using just QPixmap and XImage, but it would still be
inefficent when used in things like KImageShop's canvas. Even with
XImage you still need to convert back and forth to ImageMagick's
internal format.

The approach I am taking to this is I also want to do a new image
viewer, so I will implement it with that first and if it works well it
can also be integrated with KImageShop. I want a new image viewer
anyways because nothing so far for either DE matches the power of xv. I
can hear you all now - "xv???". Yep, nothing so far compares to xv for
speed, basic color editing, and other cool features. Note that I am
referring to image viewing, not manipulation. Kview is supposed to be
lightweight and for things like viewing images in Konq so I figured I
would do a new one and we would have two: a lightweight and efficent
viewer (kview), and a heavyweight viewer with a lot of features. It
would have a algorithms menu like xv, and we can use that to test
ImageMagick stuff. This would be a new project so if your interested in
co-authoring it please feel free to email me.

Widget Theme Designer

My personal vapourware project, I started this too soon and I ended up
rewriting it three times - each time I rewrote KThemeBase and Style.
Needless to say I got sick of it quickly and now have other things to do
;-) If someone definitely wants to work on this I will clean it up as it
doesn't even compile anymore, otherwise you won't see it until after
KDE2 is done.

Misc apps

Like I think most developers, my HD is filled with quick one day apps
that are sometimes cool, sometimes half-baked ;-) I am going to start
cleaning these up and commititing them to kdenonbeta. If you see me
commit things there feel free to hack them at will, you don't need to
contact me or anything.

-- 
Daniel M. Duley - Unix developer & sys admin.
mosfet@mandrakesoft.com
mosfet@kde.org
mosfet@jorsm.com

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