More 4.6 panel thoughts
In this blog entry Aaron Seigo talks about Plasma, the panel/desktop framework for KDE4. The ideas about data engines and data visualizations are really interesting.
I have been thinking about this for Xfce as well: it would be really cool if we could provide plugin writers with data sources and display widgets to easily write status monitors for the panel.
The idea I had is that the display widgets could be in-process, so it would be an internal plugin, but the data to display would be obtained and processed by an external process, through a DBUS protocol or whatever. This has the shared advantage of in-process widgets, which are a lot easier to handle (no more XEMBED, yay), and out-of-process data handling (no GUI blocking or crashing of the panel).
Of course we really should get Xfce 4.4 out before even considering the possibilities for 4.6…