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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: RFC: WorKflow mockup / prototype
From:       "Robert Knight" <robertknight () gmail ! com>
Date:       2006-06-01 14:34:01
Message-ID: 13ed09c00606010734j46bbc5dfqfd8d22f0914f0466 () mail ! gmail ! com
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Hi Thomas,

Workflow sounds like a really useful tool, but It isn't absolutely
clear from the screenshot how the UI will work.
As an example use case for batch renaming files, supposing I had a set
of files in a directory with names like this:

"Invoice Jan 04"
"Invoice Feb 04"
"Invoice Mar 04"
...
"Invoice May 06"

And I wanted to remove the word "Invoice" from each file name, to end up with:

"Jan 04"
"Feb 04"
...
"May 06"

Could you explain how would I might do this in the UI?  Some
walkthroughts of how common use cases like this would work would be
helpful (other tasks I can think of might be printing a batch of files
or converting a set of files from one format to another)

Some other questions about WorKflow.

- Is there any planned mechanism to allow developers to add additional
tasks to Workflow?

- How will Workflow handle the situation where the external utilities
for a task or set of tasks are not available?  Supposing there are a
set of tasks related to image processing that require ImageMagick (eg.
as in your SoC proposal, adjust brightnes, rotate etc.).  What would
Workflow do if ImageMagick was not installed?  (Since it isn't really
feasable to make every external utility a dependancy of the program).

Regards,
Robert.


On 31/05/06, Thomas Kadauke <tkadauke@gmx.de> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I'm the SoC student working on WorKflow. In case you didn't hear about it yet,
> you can read my proposal at:
>
>   http://vophercel.homelinux.org/~tkadauke/workflow.txt
>
> The code I've produced so far is available at:
>
>   http://vophercel.homelinux.org/~tkadauke/workflow-0.1.tar.gz
>
> (It doesn't really do anything yet, so if you make install it, don't forget to
> make uninstall it afterwards)
>
> And finally, a screenshot can be found at:
>
>   http://vophercel.homelinux.org/~tkadauke/shot.png
>
> I would appreciate any kind of feedback. However, I have specific questions
> about a few things (if you think that you'd help me too much with my SoC
> project by answering one of the following questions, then please don't
> answer):
>
> - Does it build at all? :)
>
> - Usability: What do you think about the layout of the commands, as seen on
> the screenshot? In particular, what about the "frame" around the actual
> command GUI? In the future, it will be possible to arrange commands to be
> next to each other, which means that the workflow will be represented by a
> directed acyclic graph. With that, there can be independent command execution
> paths in parallel, which can be joined at some point. Do you think this is a
> good idea, or is it useless? How should the layout look like?
>
> - Documentation: About half of the classes are documented yet. What do you
> think about the quality of the documentation?
>
> - Core/UI separation: I can see that the upcoming KDE 4 kdelibs will be
> designed to separate the core from the UI. I've tried to do that, too (see
> the src/core and src/ui directories). Do you think that's a good idea, or is
> it pointless?
>
> - Command API: The src/core directory contains all the classes needed to
> create an additional command library. What do you think about the API, in
> particular the Command class? If WorKflow is ever going into KDE 4, this will
> affect many developers, so I want to do it the right way.
>
> - KDE technology. I've tried to use as much KDE technology as possible. Do you
> see points where I could integrate KDE technology further?
>
> - QScrollView bug?: If you drag two commands into the main view and close the
> first command, the command layout will contain a hole. Is that a bug with
> Qt's layout system in combination with QScrollView? Or am I not supposed to
> use QLayout classes inside a QScrollView's viewport()?
>
> Thanks in advance for any feedback.
>
> --Thomas
>
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>
 
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