there is a thread for that question viewtopic.php?f=285&t=122150

we need some subdirectories and how can we close a thread.

alake wrote:In fact, if we were to push this a little further, if a plasmoid has additional settings, the correct place to expose all such settings should be in the normal plasmoid settings (or a sys settings kcm) right? I'm thinking plasmoid HIG here and wondering if such guidance could head off non-standard settings dialogs for plasmoids. (Sorry it might be a little off-topic from the dictionary plasmoid discussion.)

Yes, we should put that in an HIG: "All settings which are specific to a Plasmoid have to be accessible via the Plasmoid's Settings dialog" Then we can say "Settings which affect not only the Plasmoid but other areas as well have to be accessible via System Settings".
Would that work?

colomar wrote:Yes, we should put that in an HIG: "All settings which are specific to a Plasmoid have to be accessible via the Plasmoid's Settings dialog" Then we can say "Settings which affect not only the Plasmoid but other areas as well have to be accessible via System Settings".
Would that work?

Works for me!

As for the dictionary plasmoid, I think we've accomplished what we intended. With the great suggestions from folks here, especially andreas_k, I'll recommend the following visual updates to Marco:


For the moment I've left off the speech playback feature, but I'll reference this thread and mention it as one of the suggestions made here. Also I think we've resolved the issue of where settings should be consistently exposed for plasmoids (which will go into the HIG).

Thanks for everyone's contributions!

This hasn't really been addressed as a formal thing (that I'm aware of); but I'll fire it out here because it's somewhat relevant;

Should plasmoids have titles?

Specifically, for the dictionary, should we have the placeholder text be "dictionary" and eliminate the title alltogether?

No title, showing a result


No title, ready state


Because I make lives difficult: a word cloud in the ready state. Words could be listed in alphabetical order and sized by how recently they were looked up. Or there could be an option to display various clouds; recent words, popular words, etc.

Don't make fun of my random words.

EDIT:

Or, re-reading things over;


If "recent lookups" was the default view in the ready state, then the dropdown is pointless, so we could split the box, have the left be the lookup field / clear button, and have the right side be the mode setter. Since the mode dropdown would display what the thing is, it still eliminates the need for a title area.

Edit 2:
The various placeholders should have been;
- Type a word to define
- Type a word for synonyms
- Find a legal definition

(sorry, don't have the origionals on me)

... Thinking of translations, it might be a bit complex and out-of-scope for a dictionary; any sort of translation widget would also need to/from language inputs, and should also provide syntax tools... Even if it was just to the users' language, the user might be multilingual, and there would still need to be more controls for the from language if any sort of auto-detection failed.

Kver wrote:Should plasmoids have titles?

My first idea was yes but after taking a look at the mixer plasmoid (or rather just the volume) I would say no. Nice mockups, Kver. I like especially the idea how to integrate different sources.

@Kver: Great work on the mockups – I really like them!

The source selection looks great, and usually the words you are searching for are not too long anyway, so your solution would work and be IMHO a very elegant solution.

Nice idea with the recent/popular words (maybe even word of the day) – I would actually find that useful in everyday life.

I agree that the dictionary and translation plasmoids should be kept separate.

I like your mockups, Kver, but I have one question: How does one select the language(s) on the translation option?

Sogatori wrote:I like your mockups, Kver, but I have one question: How does one select the language(s) on the translation option?

My current vote is to drop translations, since a definition plasmoid seems ill-suited for translations; it's a bit of a xorg thing - it's probably better to do one thing right than several things O.K, and save translations to a dedicated plasmoid which could offer more facilities. But if we did implement it (while adding a minimal number of additional appearing controls) as a sort of minimal "quick what's this word" thing - if the user doesn't need more robust translations - I would probably implement it in the plasmoid settings;

Assuming we only use this thing as a light referential tool (not one you'd do serious translations with) we can probably safely assume that the user just wants to find out what something meant. So the plasmoid would just have a list of "to" languages the user would pick from in the settings which would appear in the dropdown. The "from" would be locked to autodetect in the back-end. It would start by adding your systems language to the list, and in the plasmoid settings you could add more. Then when using the plasmoid the languages would show up as options in the dropdown (using English and French as examples):

Dictionary
Thesaurus
Legal
---
To English
Pour français

So it might look like...

Kver wrote:

Sogatori wrote:My current vote is to drop translations, since a definition plasmoid seems ill-suited for translations; it's a bit of a xorg thing - it's probably better to do one thing right than several things O.K, and save translations to a dedicated plasmoid which could offer more facilities.

Especially Plasmoids should really follow the "Do one thing and do it well" principle, so I fully agree with you that a dictionary Plasmoid isn't a translation Plasmoid and should not be one. Plasmoids are lightweight enough to just use both if one needs both.