Glovebox is still rolling around on my laptop. I managed to sit down today after a few weeks of on-and-off thinking of how to best solve my current problem: how to do widgets.

One idea was to hack the KDE bits out of Plasma and just stick it in there, but there’s a few problems with that:

• Near impossible to update libplasma
• I’d add kdelibs as a dependency, if I didn’t hack out the bits
• Would take forever
• Its a shameful, ugly hack.

Over time, I came to the conclusion that I won’t use plasma, but I’ll use it as a reference for some of the really great ideas it has.

Plasma’s main goal is for a slick looking desktop, be it for a PC, internet tablet, embedded device, or PDA. I’m sure someone from the plasma team would like to say that its great for my project, and I’d like to agree. I can’t really think of a good reason to not have it in, other than the fact that I don’t want kdelibs as a dependency. Perhaps I’m just bullish and falling for the Not-Invented-Here thinking.

If someone out there in kdeland can figure a way to jam plasma into Glovebox without requiring someone to install the whole kdelibs package, I’d like to hear that.

Anyways, I wrote my own little widget system. Its very simple for right now, as I don’t have any kind of theming in. Thats next I think.

Oh yeah, the obligatory screenshot:

Here you can see, what else, a clock. Its just a proof-of-concept clock though. I’m working on theming next.