Here are the top things that need to be or are being worked on in Kicker. They are rated as to expected difficulty, from one to five stars. They are also rated as to desirability, from one to five plusses. Issues Of Import ---------------- Layout management autoexpending panels on the same side of the screen need to stop expanding at the point they run into each other. make autohiding panels respect tqlayout tqgeometry too? e.g. don't overlap autounhiding panels should not obscure other panels ContainerArea completness doesn't autoscroll when moving a container doesn't add items near the mouse even position Bring some standardization to how the various plugins are handled Allow menubar == mainpanel Move more of the buttons/ classes into menuext/ Move appropriate applets into menuext/ revisit libtaskbar and libtaskmanager coordinate with kasbar authors add support for composite revisit DCOP interface remove old/nonsensical calls extend with calls to: retrieve a panel dcop ref hide/unhide ... ? libkicker document functions namespace it all (KickerLib?) prep for binary compat move Panner -> core/ does taskbar really need to use Panner? rename global.h/cpp -> util.h/cpp add: ServiceMenu? PanelDrag? KPanelExtension KPanelApplet allow usage of KickerTip ExtensionSettings ExtensionButton poor name =/ shouldn't be so menu-centric either Optimize! hiding: it seems there are more tqgeometry calls made than really needed get rid of movies (which nobody really uses) in PanelButton Code clean ups remove pseudo transparency in favour of composite means handling composite properly, e.g. just the background and not the actual icons, text, etc. flatten the PanelExtension -> ContainerArea -> ContainerAreaLayout hierarchy. perhaps merge PanelExtension and ContainerArea? get rid of the insane number of classes in ui/? A _good_ theming system Being Worked On --------------- Applets ------- Clock Use styleclock.nextVersion() Get rid of swallow applet Make trash an extension button Unnasigned ----------------------- +++++ Keyboard accessability **** We will follow the lead of the GNOME panel accessability work: http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/keynav/panelnav.html To summarise: - Ctrl-Alt-Tab cycles focus between panels [Shift to reverse] - Tab cycles focus between objects on the focused panel [Shift to reverse] - Arrow keys move focus within a focused applet - Space activates focused control (on panel or within an applet) +++++ Settings dialog fix up *** Now that we have KConfigXT, use it in the settings dialogs Convert the "Arrangement" and "Hiding" modules. "Menus" and "Appearance" are done as far as possible. ++++ Floating panels **** When a panel is set to "floating" the following entries are added to the [General] config group: FloatingPosition <-- tqgeometry.topLeft(); FloatingOrientation <-- horizontal or vertical ++++ Drag and drop enhancements *** Drag and drop behaviour is broken in various ways in kicker. A popup menu should appear on drop like in Konqueror and KMail. Dropping on buttons like QuickBrowsers, the Home icon, etc should behave consistently and like dropping to a file manager window. There are many DnD reports on bugs.kde.org which can provide further inspiration. ++++ Systray icon tqlayout **** The systray applet does a very basic homebrew tqlayout of the icons that currently has several flawed assumptions that break when used with certain applications. These assumptions include that all icons in a given row will be approximately the same width and that things are always LTR (left to right). It should use a QGridLayout and do some semi-intelligent packing of the icons. ++ Dialog for adding elements to the panel *** Context menus are primarily used by advanced users, and yet this is the only way to manage the items on the panel. There used to be a control panel that allowed turning on or off applets on the main panel but this is obviously too restrictive and I'd prefer not to see yet another tab in the kicker control panels. A dialog that shows previews of the specials buttons and applets and allows one to either drag and drop or with a button add items to a given panel would make kicker that much more accessable to more of our users.