[Qgis-developer] Panels and plugins

[Jorge Tornero - Listas]

Hello everybody,

Well, I'm trying to put my plugin (transectizer) beyond the 
'experimental box' of plugins and thus improving it a little and, of 
course, fix its many problems.

One of this problems concerns the visibility of the plugin itself. I've 
decide to make it a dockable widget rather than a floating dialog, 
mainly because the plugin needs canvas interaction and the dialog goes 
to the back of the main QGIS dialog when clicking the canvas. Also, 
because many transects can be defined one after the other, it looks more 
fancy to have the dialog docked and always visible. Forcing the user to 
click in the taskbar again and again doesn't look like a nice idea.

Anyway, I've detected two behaviors that I'm not sure that they are 
intended/desired:

1) Even when the user 'shuts down' the docked widget, it looks like the 
plugin is still loaded and working and it has just been hidden (when I 
used the single dialog approach, the plugin just get closed and destroyed).

2) I can't figure out how to add the panel to the panels menu (in linux 
it's under Settings->Panels, I think in windows it changes and don't 
know about Mac), and in fact I don't know if it is a desirable feature 
(maybe it is reserved to non-experimental plugins or featured ones)


In both cases... Are they the expected and desirable behaviors? Human 
Interface Guidelines don't say much about this. Regarding to this, HIG 
discourage the use of stacked widgets, but... What about toolboxes (like 
tab widgets but with a more 'vertical' design?

And one last question... I think I've read about 'proper' icons for 
plugins, etc. I think someone was 'in charge' of this and I would like 
to ask about this to someone, providing there aren't (AFAIK) 
documentation about this topic.

Thank you very much, have a nice day

Jorge Tornero