This is a tiny plasmoid hacked on a boring sunday afternoon in about 20 mins, perhaps a too silly name but i think the effect is kinda fun 🙂
It’s an on-screen magnifying glass with the difference from the usual ones that it doesn’t actually grab the screen, but it just views the Plasma canvas (just another view on the scene, that is), that gives some peculiarities, shown in this video:
All the windows are totally transparent to it, so while is useful to view/magnify just what there is on desktop it can give a quick access on it, when you need both your windows and stuff on desktop (think about a non-fullscreen dashboard, and then think about drag and drop between dolphin and folderview even when you have a maximized window :P)
And the more cute thing is due to the vector nature of the QGraphicsView, you see all the proper vector-based elements like the text to be smoothly scaled and still looking like text, not that usual pixelated/blurry mess that kinda hinders the utility of screen magnifiers as accessibility applications.
It’s amazing what it’s possible to do in plasma with a really limited amount of lines of code (here about 100, perhaps 20 or so could even still be saved:)
The thing now lives in playground and is still really rough, so not definitely 4.2 material, but who feels like can give it a try anyways:)
it would be nice to avoid that bad pixels images (look at the sun when it’s zoomed, but keeping the high quality image using the svg). what do you think?
>it would be nice to avoid that bad pixels images (look at the sun when it’s zoomed
not for now, because at the moment svgs are rasterized way before hitting the graphicsview painter, this saves a lot of resources in terms of both memory and cpu, and we want pasma as fast as we can