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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    KasBar, Taskbar and other kicker stuff
From:       Richard Moore <rich () ipso-facto ! freeserve ! co ! uk>
Date:       2000-11-25 23:24:10
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In order to support both the various features people asked for when I
discussed KasBar on dot.kde.org without ending up with a completely
unmaintainable application, I've decided to rewrite KasBar. It's a
fairly small application, so this isn't a big deal, but it occurs to
me this gives us a good opportunity. The rewrite has a model-view
design, so most of the core 'taskbar' functionality is encapsulated in
two reusable classes: Task and TaskList. These classes handle all the
hard stuff like startup notification, window menus, the various
policies for what to list etc.

How would people feel about adding these classes to kdelibs to give
people the building blocks for taskbars as part of our framework? My
reasoning is that there are so many different ways to list tasks that
despite providing both the standard taskbar and kasbar we will never
keep everyone happy. Providing these classes as part of the libraries
would help ensure that the alternatives 3rd parties are certain to
write, will still provide all of the standard functions.

While we're on this subject, you may recall that I made much the same
argument about the kicker clock applet a few months ago (eg. I think
support for displaying multiple clocks in different time zones, an
alarm etc. should always be present). I think that there is a strong
case for providing some sort of 'libkdedesktop' which would provide
abstract classes allowing people to replace both elements of kicker,
and of kdesktop with alternatives and to ensure that the alternatives
are of a high-quality.

There are a few places where I think this could be useful:

- Taskbar (as I said)
- Clock
- KRun dialog
- Task switch dialog (alt-tab)

How does everyone else feel about this? I can accept that it might be
completely over the top, but I think it's worth considering.

Rich.

-- 
     Richard Moore		rich@ipso-facto.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.macromedia.com/	rjmoore@macromedia.com
http://developer.kde.org/	rich@kde.org

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