Sorting group of icons II

Defining areas and rules for sorting icons

This feature follows the one described in the following link :

http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=37747
It is related to sorting / re-arranging icons on the users desktop.

If you look at the link above, I was talking bout organizing icons in « shapes » defined by the user :
« From that point, we can imagine sorting the icons in a shape defined by the user and many variants ! »

In this part, we will describe those « shapes » or areas, and a how they could be integrated in KDE 4.

Describing behaviour is not an easy task, and I hope you will be able to get the meaning of this post. If not, just ask for some precisions.


Aim :

What would be really cool, is that one could define areas where icons would sort themselves automatically (have a look at the second screenshot where areas are defined over a wallpaper where areas are defined). When selecting icons you could choose to which area to assign a group of icons and could re-arrange icons in this area without moving the ones in others areas. This could be done by « hand » or given some « rules ».

Have a look at the screenshots. In the first one, you see the desktop before. In the second one you can see the areas defined over the wallpaper. After sorting the icons, they would be affected to those areas (see the third screenshot) : the desktop related icons on the top left corner, the application shortcuts on the top right corner and the files and folders on the bottom area.

In this post, we deal with defining areas. In a following post we will deal on how to set rules !

User experience :

For the user when selecting the area, a nice effect could be:
once areas have been defined, they could be selected by the user for sorting its icons. For example, you click on the icons > sorting > area, and the defined areas would appear (with a nice effect when you move your mouse over an area allowing the user to select where to put the selected icons.


Who would define areas ?

The theme designer : he could define the areas to fit his wallpaper.
The wallpaper designers
The user should be able to define his own layout
...

By default, some icon areas would be defined, like the : « no area », the border area (the icons follow the borders of the desktop), the « quarter area » (the desktop is divided in four equal parts)... Those could be named the pre-defined icon layers.

How to modify an area layout ?

Several solutions :

Predifined area layout : right click on the desktop > icons > selecting a predefined layer
You could then choose between the different choices

User defined area layout : right click on the desktop > icons > define your own sorting layer.
You would only see the wallpaper with no icons and could draw on it the areas you want.

The theme area layout : When setting a theme or a wallpaper, you could also set an « icon layer » associated with a wallpaper (in a separtate file).

How to define which icons should go to which area ?

The question is : how to set rules to organize icons ? :

Manually :The user selects manually a group of icons and affects it to an area
Using « rules » : The user could use Tenor (or any other searching framework) to affect rules to each area. For example, selecting on the desktop all the pdf files and putting them in a defined area. But also, putting in an area all the images containing the word « Cat » from the directory XXX.

On the development side

With plasma, as I read something about having « layers » (for example for the raindrop effects), we can imagine adding a new layer for defining « icons areas » : the icons positionning layer (is that a sexy name ?).

Using such concepts would be nice because they are well separated : Plasma for showing everything, and Tenor for defining rules to select and any application creating « rules » could just use the « desktop icons areas » to show the result of anything.

Thinking that way opens an infinty of possibilities for new idea, for example, this could be the basics for a « virtual desktop » : You could display on the desktop results from a search in a defined area or anything you want !!!!


Sorting objects : defining areas for sorting everything

Until now, we only dealt with icons, but such areas could also be useful to define layouts to attach for example applets positionning or anything (application window...).

You could have a new way of managing icons but also to organize how icons, applets, running apps... could be sorted and arraged on your desktop !

As Aaron posted it :

http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2006/04/plasma-data-engines.html

You could provide to those areas (which could be visualizations) any kind of dataSource (search, selected icons, the content of any directory...).

This could in some way repl