Re: [gDesklets] Moonlight desklets

["Christian Meyer" <christian meyer gmail com>]

Hi,

we need something like this:
http://jacksonito.blogspot.com/2007/06/mono-developers-guide-to-writing-xaml.html

2007/6/26, Lauri Kainulainen <lauri sokkelo net>:
> A very interesting read to start my morning with :). I still think (call
> me stubborn) that gDesklets with a dedicated renderer and a simple
> ADL-language+python can beat C# and XAML, but that's just my 2c.


The unique idea which we have in gDesklets is what you describe and beside
the technical things, not everyone fancies C#/Mono ;-)
No...let's stick to the facts and don't start a language war (I like both C#
and python. There's an interesting article which covers Python 3000:
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=208549)


However I'd like to point out a few concepts from moonlight desklets,
> screenlets, etc. that gDesklets should support (not high priority, just
> thoughts):
>
> - A richer way to do animations. This is currently our shortfall. I'm
> not sure how hard it would be to have some kind of simple support using
> SVG. At least we should think of a very easy API for developers to use
> animations.


Martin and I were thinking about this about 2 years ago, when both of us
weren't as limited in time as we are now.
I made a simple desklets which displayed a svg animation. It's not too
difficult but I have to agree that it should be much easier to do. I
somewhat hate the current situation.

- Widget support and official theme support. This has been discussed
> earlier. Widgets and themes would make desklet development easier, would
> allow re-usable components and make the desklets look more unified.
> Basically the current ADL-elements can be thought of UI-widgets, but we
> would still benefit greatly if the widgets could be easily themed. I'm
> really not an expert since I haven't even used SideCandy or any of the
> other good theme-engines.


Agreed. Theme support should be definitely included in 0.40. There's no
question about it!

It would also be cool to provide support for 3rd party widgets. For
> instance some one could provide the good'ol TreeView as a widget that is
> created using python + ADL and others could use it simply by including
> it in their desklets.


I don't get it :-)

We can already do all this, but I think we should come up with a de
> facto way so that people could collaborate easier.


Should we have a brainstorming session on IRC? Ideas can be collected and
moved to the wiki (wiki is currently broken, my fault, lighttpd has some
issues when you change the config. I have to find out what's wrong).

Regards,
Christian