5

I know Plasma is all about clocks

But I think it's time to clean this mess a bit up. We have digital and analog clocks, fuzzy clocks, reminder or countdowns, word clocks ...

I think there should be exactly one clock plasmoid, which has different styles, like digital, analog, ... should be able to remind me if my tea is ready, tell me how much time i have left until my talk, ... and also serve as a reminder if korganzier find out it's my aunts birthday. It should also take the functionality of the world clock, showing what time it is in other timezones.

It ideally also should have a interface to the systems cron and at jobs, so I can start a lengthy calculation job at midnight, maybe even to the ACPI functionality so I can tell the computer when to shutdown or wake up.

There should maybe even a plugin architecture, so that for example the mythtv backend could tell the clock when my favourite TV show starts.

I know that collides in some points with KDEs idea of "notifications" so some additional discussion what a time related task is may be necessary.

I think Plasma has gone a way similar to the Unix philosophy, "write programs that do one thing and do it well". The benefits I personally see are:

• Smaller plasmoids, which are easier to maintain.
• Uncluttered configuration dialog.
• Easier to discover. You can see that you can add an "Analog Clock" without going through the settings.

As for duplication of effort, there's something called data engines - so if you want to create a new clock, you don't have to write everything from scratch. See techbase and this old blog post for more information.

I'm sure aseigo can give you a better answer why things are the way they are.

I often refer myself to that old unix philosophy

But ... this philosophy has it's roots deep in the console days, where you could set up mighty command lines by combining the simple tools, either through pipes or in shell scripts. So in this philosophy the desktop is a shell and ideally it would be possible to "concatenate" plasmoids to build from simple plasmoids more complex ones.

But that's in what I'm asking for, the clock plasmoid should be in one way more extendable, maybe through plugins to show up time based events from other applications, and in another way do one thing "more" right: Showing the time is one task, no matter if its digital, analog or fuzzy or you non-local timezone. We have exactly one date command in the gnu tools, which handles a lot of formats. Not several date commands per format.

So in that meaning I'm exactly asking for the old Unix philosophy. Be more flexible and do one thing right.

furanku wrote:But ... this philosophy has it's roots deep in the console days, where you Showing the time is one task, no matter if its digital, analog or fuzzy or you non-local timezone. We have exactly one date command in the gnu tools, which handles a lot of formats. Not several date commands per format.

I suggest you read up on DataEngines

I know about plasma data engines and had these in mind when I mentioned a plugin system.

But their existance doesn't change the fact that we still have several plasmoids which just display the time in different formats and each of them can't be extended to do something more useful then just sitting on you desktop or panel and display the time, which is certainly not what the flexible data engine achitecture was made for, wouldn't you agree?

Well, the thing is, if you want to extend a plasmoid, you write yourself an extended plasmoid. There's a lot of scripting languages they added so that any person who knows one of the languages can put together the a lot of different dataengines and make himself a plasmoid.

And as for unix philosophy, it's "do one thing, and do it well" not "put in everything but the kitchen sink." In the first post you mentioned a lot of thing you'd want the clock to do, and "date" can't really do that for you. If you wanted to time your tea, you'd use "sleep," and if you wanted to time a command, you'd use "time." And if you want to make people look at you funny, you'd use "ddate."

Plasma offers these little tools as dataengines, but to join them together, you need to write a script.

I disagree. Writing program code is not the way to work with a graphical user interface. I do write programs for myself, but you can never explain a simple user to learn python or pearl to make the desktop work the way he or she expects it.

And of course there are more time related programs in the gnu tools, but the analogy here is one date command with it's flexible format string and the analog, digital, fuzzy and world clock plasmoids. The anology between a pipe or a shell script are the data engines and their (missing) integration in the clock plasmoids. Please, keep things in their context! Scripts and pipes are the "natural" way to combine things on the command line, bit they are not in a GUI. Especially for simple and obvious things like telling the clock to remind me in three minutes.

I think the problem here is not that the clocks are different applications, but that Plasma's configurability is still very primitive.

Let's say you want a countdown. How do you start it? Would it be a context menu that brings up KTimer? And what happens when your timer starts? Does it replace the clock with the countdown? (What if I still need to know time?)

What I think would be a solution is a better set of containments, and there should be a way to set up plasmoids so that they disappear whenever they are inactive. For example, I could make at the end of the panel in which I put a clock and beneath it I place the timer. However, when the timer is inactive, it disappears. Or it could be a containment where the visible plasmoid switches on mouse wheel, so if I scroll over the clock, instead of switching timezones, it would show the next plasmoid, like the timer (but that would mean I'd actually have to have several clocks if I wanted to know different timezones' time). And if you want to be alerted when your show starts, it should be yet another plasmoid which only pops up when it's time, and disappears when you close it.

Another reason I don't like the idea of lumping everything together is that if I were to write a fancy LED clock and put it on kde-look, I shouldn't have to reimplement the timer because the timer is built into the official KDE clock and people expect it to be there.

So my point is that I think the individual plasmoids should be should be kept simple. It's the thing that is running them (in this case Plasma) that should allow people to do what they want with them.

1) Of course we can discuss usability questions. Everything in a GUI should be reviewed with respect of this. But I think, if we discuss how to implement my idea, we should do it in an open minded, unbiased and constructive way, and, sorry Alec, I don't wont to insult you, but I think you simply don't like the idea. That's absolutely OK, but maybe your in that case not the right person to think about possible implementations.

2) About your auto-disappearing plasmoids: I think this is a different idea, so maybe you want to open a thread fort that.

3) If you want to write another clock (Well isn't that a bit ironic to mention in this thread?) you should use Plasma's plasmaclock library anyway, which for example offers the possibility to speak the time since a few days. So much for the "clean & simple" approach.