My progress

[Marco Martin]

On Tuesday 13 January 2009, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> 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,...?)

hmm woudn't this mean duplicating knotify in a similar-but-not-quite way?

> 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 ....