My progress

[Henk te Sligte]

2009/1/13 Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org>:
> 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?)
It's a great project to download nzb's, and, instead of the other
common usenet leechers, it's cross-platform. But yes, the name is
quite hard to pronounce (I simply say it as I read it (in dutch)).
>
>> 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".
Well, I wasn't planning on starting to hack away with that page as a
reference ;-) As soon as I get closer to the center of Plasma, I would
simply ask for things to do.
>
> 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,...?)
Sounds nice to me :) I'll bug you on irc as soon as I feel I can do
something like that.
>
> 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...
Well, that's exactly why I sent the mail. I knew there should be small
jobs, but it's quite hard to find such things for a newcomer :)
>
> 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.
Well, I'm quite satisfied with my pancakes as breakfast, but well,
everyone has his own taste :-P
>
> here's a really trivial one, though:
>
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=179563
I looked to it, and it seems quite easy to fix, I already found the
file which contains the strings. I don't have a svn-account yet, but
I'll try to find someone on IRC who can help me out.

Thanks for the friendly mail btw :) I feel like I'm getting a
littlebit closer in the team already :)
>
> 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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