[gDesklets] SideCandy 0.20

[Bjoern Koch <H Humpel gmx de>]

Hi there,

last Sunday in the (weekly) IRC meeting (as you all remember, right ?!
;) ) we - well, that's pycage and me - had a brief discussion about
SideCandy 0.20.

So here are (roughly) the first ideas about SC-0.20:
(I can provide the whole logfile of this "meeting" if someone is
interested...)


Overview:

 1. Bugfixes
 2. new features
 3. new backgrounds etc.


Ad 1.:
There are a lot of (known) things to be fixed and there are a few
bugfixes out there. We just need to collect and implement them ;).


Ad 3.:
- A few new backgrounds and themes should be included.
- Every prefs entry should have a help entry/attribute.
- The "prefs icons" should be used (or "introduced to gD"), too. Still a
bug about that out there. The tango icons might be a good choice, too.
- New borders would be nice. There is a "glassy border by tkmt" out
there ?! Bigger borders would be nice, too, but the candy.script just
supports 5px gfx (so far).


Ad 2.:
- gD's prefs system doesn't support scrollbars yet and the SideCandy tab
is pretty crowded already
 -> with more improvements / additional features we would need a second
tab for SC !

- opacity for the backgrounds would be nice
 -> the <group> element doesn't support opacity yet. This might be
"easily" done by "reusing the opacity code from <image>" (which is
written in C. If someone knows where to find and how to do it... ;) )

- we could save some "space" in the prefs by introducing a ConfigToggle
(with multiple selection) for the borders
 -> wouldn't be too hard to implement (once the handling of (loading and
saving) lists in the core is fixed - see ConfigList) even though the HIG
doesn't seem to "like" toggles (but we agreed that - especially in this
case - one toggle would be much better and nicer than the 4 bools we
have right now)


These are basically the results so far. Unfortunately we ran out of time
to discuss more great ideas for SC-0.20 :/.



Anyway, I personally would introduce a sizing system to SC. Sometimes
you just would like to have a bigger display as e.g. with a different
font things do not fit anymore.
A "dynamic system" would be perfect, but unfortunately when a display
grows vertically it might overleap the display underneath it (will say:
there is no way of dynamic moving other display files which have been
"grouped"). If I remember correctly you can see this when grouping
SC-Users and/or SC-PrintQueue with other displays.
But we could (as a beginning) simply included two <unit> for the height
and width of a display so a user can somehow "fix" things without having
to touch the display's code.

Furthermore I am wondering if SideCandy should be part of the "Add up to
3 desklets" blueprint on LP ??


So, more ideas, suggestions, comments etc. ???

Greetings, Bjoern