Re: Animations for deletion of files

On Fri, 14 Mar 2003 08:38, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:

> Just want to drop here a possible animation for deleting files I have
> in my mind and can't get rid of:
>
> You already can drag'n'drop your files to the trash can. Yes. Nice.
> Maybe you even have some feedback by sound. But this is only for
> mouse users!
>
> So what about the feedback for keyboard users? One presses "Del" and
> the icons just disappear. But doesn't "Del" mean "Move to the trash
> can"? Why don't the icons just "fly" automatically to the trash can
> icon? When hidden behind a window the trash can simply gets a copy in
> front of the window where all icons are heading to. Would be even
> better if there is a representation of the trashcan on kicker.

KDE doesn't need to contain *everything* in the universe, its already 
bloated and slow. (Sorry guys, but its true. Try using KDE 3 with a 
330MHz processor and no graphics accelerator. Konq takes a week and a 
half to open a new window, Kmail menus lag behind the mouse, swapping 
from one desktop to another is a pain...)

In other OSes, like Mac OS and Windows, one can create "add-ons" which 
add functionality (or whimsey) to the OS. I remember a darling like 
extension to Mac OS that popped up a little picture of Oscar the Grouch 
over the Trash Can when you emptied it, and he would sing "I Love 
Trash".

Is there any reason why these sort of trash animations etc need to be 
part of the KDE core? Can't these things be implemented in some sort of 
modular fashion, like a plug-in for browsers, so that if you don't want 
it, you don't have to have it?

Its not good enough to have a preference setting to turn it off. The 
code is still sitting on disk and in memory. Some people say disks are 
cheap, but I don't see them offering to buy me a new disk... :-)

The way I see it, you could have a situation where there was a known 
"magic directory", and any plug-in inside that directory was enabled. 
Remove it from the directory, and KDE wouldn't see it.

Is it technically possible to do this?

The other advantage is that people who want fun or interesting or useful 
plug-ins could create them, independently of the main KDE development 
cycle. So long as there were known and stable hooks in KDE, people 
could add functionality without it needing to be part of KDE proper.

(Think about perl, or C++, or Python, and the enormous number of 
libraries for those languages. Suppose you couldn't write libraries, if 
you wanted to add a tool you had to get it built into the core 
language... Module design is *good*, but I guess you already know 
that.)



> Now, what I really have in mind is: The icons are jumping to the
> trashcan so the sound goes "Doingdoingdoingdoingdoing..bish". Each
> icon has its own sound track synced with the graphics ("Boing"
> emitted when hitting the imagined ground)*, all icons are started
> with random temporal offsets: Imagine the noise a whole directory
> gets deleted! =:-D 

Yes, and that's enough to frighten me away from the idea.



-- 
Steven D'Aprano