ownCloud Client

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday, May 28, 2012 18:58:11 Sascha Manns wrote:
> today i've tried out to install Mirall/OwnCloud Client in Plasma Active
> 'cause i'm getting this Question from time to time.
> The Installation through openSUSEs isv:OwnCloud:community was successful,
> and i have a new Icon on my PA Workspace. If i'm pressing it, it starts a
> Cloud- Icon into the Systembar and i must configure it through pressing
> that Icon. The Problem is, that this Icon isn't visible in PA.
> Has anyone tried out this?

yes :)

tl;dr version:

mirall does not work well with PA right now, but the reasons are mostly 
cosmetic. getting mirall working nicely on PA would not be a huge amount of 
work: a settings page and not relying on the system tray icon (the settings 
page is important to this) would be good enough for a first version. and with 
that done i'd love to see it available for installation on PA.


ok, full version (and i've CC'd Klaas so he can be informed as well):

the sync systray icon should be avoided if at all possible. right now the tray 
icon does a couple of things:

* access to the configuration
* lets the user know when it is syncing or not

configuration should be done with a module in the Active Settings app for 
ownCloud (which would configure mirall behind the scenes). this should be 
integrated with the accounts system when that becomes available, but that can 
also happen later on without loss of very much, if any, effort. so imho that 
would be step 1: give mirall a nice QML based config page for Active Settings.

Sebas wrote a nice tutorial here on how to do this:

	http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Plasma/QML/ActiveSettings

that leaves us with letting the user know when synchronization is happening. 
on the one hand i think it would be pretty neat to see a sync icon appear and 
start turning about in the panel when the device is syncing ... and on the 
other hand i think it would be really cool if it just happened and i never had 
to think about it (which means not being bothered about it).

of course, then how do you check when the device was last synchronized? 
perhaps in the settings page, so if you really need to check on it, you could 
go and see it there. that might be made more difficult with the account system 
which will be more generic and may not be able to accomodate that.

the main use case i can see for having visual feedback is to let the user know 
when they can safely disconnect from the network.

perhaps this could be reflected in the networking UI itself: a service is busy 
using the network or not. how to integrate this is an interesting question, 
though probably not overly difficult to come up with one or more ways to do it 
cleanly. it would be very nice if services that rely on the network 
(installers, updaters, sync) all shared a consistent and central UI so that 
all "stuff using my network" could be seen at a glance. then one can connect to 
the network, watch the flurry of activity that results and when it's all done 
and dusted, disconnect.

there are also some internal things that need doing with mirall, such as:

* tuning the defaults not to kill the battery by syncing too often.

* ensuring that its process is properly nice'd so as not to wake up and take 
the little CPU power there is on these devices for syncing while i'm playing a 
game ;) this may already be done, i haven't looked.

* testing the sync-when-the-network-becomes-available code. there is some code 
already there, but fwiu it is not well tested at the moment

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/active/attachments/20120529/b9bf5266/attachment.sig>