so i hit the "publish" button on my last entry about the new phase/animator screencast when it occurred to me that i hadn't actually explained what phase/animator is or does.
in short, p/a is meant to solve three related problems:
- make it easy to use animated transitions in desktop elements so that authors of add-ons will do so
- make the animations consistent by doing them all in one place (phase)
- make it easy to change the animations (animator)
why change the animations? well, besides the obvious "because people like to tweak stuff!" there's the issue of performance: what if you are using plasma over a network and you just don't have the bandwidth to have all those animations going on? what if your cpu is really short on power? what if you just don't like animation to begin with?
phase manages the registration and lifespan of various graphical effects, including animations and transitions. it hands off all the actual image processing to an animator, one of which (that doesn't do much of anything) comes built in. if you want special effects, then plasma loads an Animator plugin and uses that instead.
to try out the default animator, open plasmarc and put this in it:
[Phase]
animator=default
there's still a good amount of work left to do on Phase/Animator, but the design essentially works at this point which is a good thing.
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3 comments:
How can you expect plasma / kde4 to succeed when screencasts don't have funky outro music? please, pick up your game!
Oh and I spose I should mention that the effects look great, the controllability for admins of thin clients etc is terrific and API looks inviting enough that kde-look.org should be a REALLY interesting place to follow post 4.0
keep up the great work :) It's been a privilege to be able to follow such a major project go through such major development cycle out in the open like this.
@nathan: "when screencasts don't have funky outro music?"
lol. i know, i totally dropped the ball on that one! i promise better things in the next screencast =)
"kde-look.org should be a REALLY interesting place to follow post 4.0"
i'm hoping so. the number of new contributions already coming in surprises me, so when it's all ready for public consumption it should be crazy (in a good way)
"out in the open like this"
it's been interesting. it's also been stressful for me. i'm a bit of a perfectionist at times and so it is hard to share things when they aren't done enough (for me).
i also hate constantly answering similar questions or dealing with naive viewpoints, which this openness inevitably invites. i'm not a naturally patient person (with myself or others); it is something that i have worked on for years and continue to do so. long ways to go yet, but this has been a really good opportunity to progress.
Yup, I imagine that the chorus of people asking the same things over and over, or worse, complaining that feature X isn't done yet could be pretty draining. When I've spent days building a backend and upon showing someone the first comment I get is 'I don't like the colour' I feel it is grounds for justifiable homicide. And I only have to do this in front of handfuls of people at a time, not in front of the entire interweb (yikes).
You do a great job on sites like osnews and the dot of answering peoples questions / queries / tangential brain farts but perhaps it might be safer to have 'official message board champions' or some such who could soak up some of that repetitive head -vs- wall work. The person called 'superstoned' does a good job on osnews for example (and nope, thats not me ;) I'm not yet that self aggrandizing). Might help save you from a bit of the spirit crushing...
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