Hi,

I am currently searching the net to find a tutorial on how to port an existing application (say gkrellm, Kopete, etc.) into a widget. By this I mean having a transparent window like the Folder View which would contain the application (for gkrellm it would be a fully customizable system monitor as a widget and for kopete it would be your list of contacts as widget).

Does anyone know where I can find info on this? Maybe it means re-coding from scratch, fine, but then what do I need and how do I learn the conventions and how to code an application as a widget?

tnx

Hi Frank, have a look at http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Plasma/GettingStarted

In plasmoids other widgets are used than in normal desktop applications, so I think you have to re-code at least the ui part.

Cheers, m

You could also take a look at the "now playing" plasmoid, that reads from the currently running media player. Guess that would be something like you want.

Hey wow, great! I wasn't sure Plasmoid was actually the widget thing.

Tnx for the nice tips, I will take time to go through that and see if I can build myself those 2 nice packages (fully complete system monitor and instant messaging software). That'll be my personal Christmas gift.

If I succeed, I will post on kde-apps for sure.

Nice, be sure to leave a link here too!

neverendingo wrote:Nice, be sure to leave a link here too!

Of course!

I wonder though, since this will be a first for me I might need some kind of help at some point, questions here and there to understand, you know if I put a / but should actually have "" after the slash, that kind of stuff. Is this forum good for development questions or is there a different one more suited?

You can also ask here, sure. That's why we have this development forums
But be sure to also checkout http://techbase.kde.org , there are great resources available, especially for Tutorials there is http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials

neverendingo wrote:You can also ask here, sure. That's why we have this development forums
But be sure to also checkout http://techbase.kde.org , there are great resources available, especially for Tutorials there is http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials

A'right! I'll start with that. Yeah I just realized my post got moved to the dev section.

tnx

You can also ask in the IRC channel, #plasma@freenode.

And then there are the kde-devel and plasma-devel maillinglists.

There you will find the most developers. Most do not really monitor the forms for dev questions.

Please take a look at this one..
http://ksvladimir.blogspot.com/2008/06/converting-any-window-into-plasmoid.html