Systray jobs and notifications

[Rob Scheepmaker]

Hello,
 
I wanted to discuss what I think should be improved in the plasma 
systemtray... not the spec, but the jobs/notifications. We discussed some of 
this already at tokamak, but there's still a lot to be done if we want this to 
be implemented for 4.3:

* job widget layout. I don't know about the rest of you, but I think this 
could be improved. The widget takes up quite some space vertically. I'm not 
sure how we can keep the widget compact while still showing all the 
information (we'll need to add the ETA too). Any ideas?

* job completed action. As discussed at Tokamak, we'll need to add an extra 
action to the JobView (and a slot to KJob) interface to allow, besides 
suspend, kill, and resume, an action that can be invoked after the job is 
finished. Kio could use this to provide an 'open' action to open the 
copied/moved file, or it's containing directory in case of multiple files. It 
should probably also provide a way to set a message for both this action, and 
the description of what has just finished.

* when a job is completed, replace the job widget with a notificationwidget, 
showing the 'completed message' (hmm, we could just use infoMessage for this, 
and let kio set a more sensible messages when a job completes (like "finished 
copying 5 files from <url>"), and showing the finished job action. We could 
add those notifications to an ExtenderGroup that contains the text "x 
completed jobs" and a "clear" button that empties this group. Wait, I'll draft 
up a extremely beautifull mockup and attach it. 
Problem: it would be very nice if this would also work across reboots, which 
isn't the case if the kjob handles this finished action. Most of the time, 
this action will just open an application with a certain set of arguments, so 
maybe we should just provide the name of an application + command line 
arguments in a string. Then the systray would just contain a firefox like 
completed jobs history, with open buttons that still work after a reboot.

* An animated icon of some sort when jobs are running, instead of the "i" 
icon. Discussed at tokamak, and makes it clearer when there are actually jobs 
running. We should probably also show a tooltip when hovering this icon. This 
icon still needs to be designed.

I'm looking forward to some brainstorming on this topic.

Regards,
Rob


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