Help request on writing a plasmoid

[Bernhard Mustermann]

Hello!

First I'd like to thank the whole KDE community for their gorgeous work :-)
.. am currently running trunk compiled from source ... and it absolutely
rocks :-)

I've been playing with the idea on taking part in the community for quite
some time but until now I was much too busy...

So.. now my problem: Documentation is a bit suboptimal .. well.. who want's
to write docu ^^ ... so I'm a bit lost on where to start ...


I'll try to explain what I'd like to do and I'd really appreciate to hear
your opinion:

1.) Counter plasmoid for bigger (special) events like Christmas, Easter, New
year, ... (counting down -- configurable from seconds to days) -- according
to the event the artwork should change

--> so not really related to appointments

2.) ability to specify own dates with own pictures (preferred SVG)... (e.g:
holiday trip to Paris)

3.) birthdays, ....

4.) possibility to show more than one event at a time (when placed on the
desktop), (e.g.: 5 days until birthday of XXX, 13 days until Christmas)

5.) on the panel it should just show an icon (e.g. easter eggs) with the
text (e.g.: 4 days left)


If it's not understandable I'll try to create a mockup... but ..well.. my
artists skills are way below non existent ^^


Design decisions:

1.) Would an extender be preferred and a good choice? What I think sounds
nice may be docking one event-counter to the clock. Although I don't know if
an extender can be iconified for the panel.

2.) As mentioned before the plasmoid should work in panels and on the
desktop itself... maybe it would be nice that the bigger the panel grows the
more information are shown.

3.) another "problem" are the time zones -- different time zones/countries
-- different dates -- think I'll have to find a solution myself.. don't
expect anything of use to be in KDE for such a usecase ^^

4.) Would themes be of any use? maybe for the basic events like Christmas,
easter, ....

5.) I think a dataengine would be the right way on separating the data from
the view?

6.) and lastly.. would anyone be willing to help me with the artwork when I
reach the point where I'd need it?


If it's of any interest for you I'd like to get this included in 4.3
extragear or something like that when I get it ready in time (which is the
reason why I'll try starting it now ^^) ... You may wonder if I have any
experience yet ... not KDE specific ... but I know Qt pretty well and I also
have some experience in other languages (Java, C++, PHP, ...) so I think it
should be manageable :-)

So far I've accomplished to compile and run a mixture of the sample plasmoid
from techbase and the digital clock from svn ^^.


I'm really looking forward on getting some feedback from you and I wish you
good luck in polishing and ironing out the last bugs for the 4.2 release :-)


Best regards

Bernhard Friedreich
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