My progress

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Tuesday 13 January 2009, Henk te Sligte wrote:
> I thought it might be a good idea to develop an applet (and engine)
> for a random purpose, just to get familiar with Plasma, I'm thinking
> about an applet which displays the status from a sabnzbd server
> (http://www.sabnzbd.org). The API of sabnzbd is quite good, so I can
> concentrate at learning Plasma.

neat, i didn't even know about sabnzbd (and... how the HECK do you pronounce 
that?)

> After that, I'm not really sure what to do next. I have seen some
> tasklists (e.g. http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Plasma/Tasks), maybe
> it's a good idea to pick one of those and see how far I get. But I'm
> not really sure about all of this.

i really need to update that page again. people keep racing ahead so quickly 
that the page needs constant tending. i'm a poor gardener, i'm afraid. 
anyways, i'm happy to point you in the direction of "stuff that needs 
attention".

something that would be relatively simple but let you play with the "guts" of 
plasma a bit is adding a standardized way for plasmoids to show a message to 
the user.

this would probably mean creating a small Plasma::Message class or (even re-
using Plasma::ToolTipContent perhaps?) and allow plasmoids to queue such 
messages with the Applet class. the Applet class would then display it in a 
"plasma" way (what does that mean? i don't know for sure, but we can work that 
out together; perhaps an overlay on the plasmoid itself if it is big enough, 
perhaps a tooltip type thing, perhaps a notification in the system tray,...?)

i have a whole list of such things just waiting to be plucked and fixed ;) 
others on this mailing list also have their own pet lists too...

and there's also bugs.kde.org which has oodles of feature requests.

> I have a couple of questions: Is the process which I have in mind a
> good idea? 

i'd say it's a perfect path.

> Am I too optimistic, because Plasma is too hard

nah, there's something in there for all skill levels. it was built to be easy 
to start hacking on.

> (as far as
> I've seen, it's quite readable, and it just makes sense).

thanks =)

> I know there
> are some mentors for KDE, is there also a mentor for Plasma, or can I
> do the learning process on my own?

you can do the learning process on your own, but you are *more* than welcome 
to ask questions here on the mailing list or in #plasma-devel. the only stupid 
question is the unasked question.

> Feel free to comment on anything I wrote, I sent this mail basically
> on two purposes: To get to know you guys a bit better, and, to be
> honest, I'd like to be a bit in the picture. Maybe someone has a small
> bug which should be easy to fix, and good to learn.

heh. those ones tend to get fixed fast. we eat bugs for breakfast around here.

here's a really trivial one, though:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=179563

most of the others after that one on the plasma bug list probably aren't great 
starter jobs.

welcome to Plasma ....

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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