SoK Project - Showing Job Progress In Icons

First off, this is my very first blog entry, and it's especially cool that this is being "aggregated" (which is an overrated word) via RSS. Little bit of background... I'm currently a high school student, and have only started KDE development somewhat recently.. sadly. Looking back, it looks like I started hacking on it in mid-February.

Down to the meat of things, I am currently taking part in the Summer of KDE (SoK), wherein I have my Handy Dandy Mentor, Aaron, whom I am required to bug oh so very much). The project I chose to work on was this nice idea over at KDE Brainstorm: http://is.gd/yghE

Since everybody loves images, here is one. This is just a mock up, from the expertise` of the idea creator.

I just loved the idea so much, and felt that I would really enjoy the moment when KDE could have this feature. Basically, when just about any transfer job is created, it would show this progress on the actual icon. So lets say you copy folder "/home/shaun/Abstract" to "/home/shaun/Pictures/Abstract" and when you navigate to "/home/shaun/Pictures/" you will see folder "Abstract" is now created, and will clearly see that there is a job being performed upon this directory--which is copying--so it would be green with progress stats on it. This would especially prevent accidents, where you suddenly realize that you just pulled a Shift+Delete on a folder that you were in the process of moving somewhere else (in the background) You thought it finished, or perhaps you just completely forgot about it, and there goes your data. I'm not saying I had this happen to me before *shifty eyes*.

Whether this should also display something for jobs that are currently reading a "source" file/folder (as opposed to just displaying what happens to the "destination" folder), I do not know. I was thinking along the lines of having it show job status for the following:

• "Download/Copy", shown on the destination file/folder.
  
• "Moving", which is just as before but this will also show some kind of move icon (if we have such a thing?), to say that something is being moved. The move status would allow you to inference that you shouldn't be trying to copy that folder.
  
• "Deleting", shown on the destination file/folder. This is where the image shown above would play a part.

Duly note that these are essentially the "3 pillars of I/O". For instance, extracting the contents of an archive, into your own directory, is considered copying. It does not (in general) change the archive itself, it merely copies the contents of it into the destination path.

I am in love with the thought of rearranging my file collections with this feature in place, it would greatly help to project an image of precisely what is happening to a folder and how long it will take. Without this, you are somewhat probing in the dark, especially when you have multiple files/folders. Naturally, this is applicable to transfers for both files and folders (since some files can get very big, think movie files).

This is quite a big task (from my perspective), but I have already begun ~2 weeks ago. What it essentially entails, is cleaning up KUIServer, to make it much easier for me to use and improve it. Instead of it being some kind of unused birds nest, it will now be depended on to relay information from all of the KIO jobs, to any "subscriber" of data (via DBus). This also means that the status of jobs will not be lost after a Plasma crash--yay!
This does however, entail 'kuiserver' basically running at start up now. Although, it will only start up when a DBus client wants to "talk" to it and when it does, it will start up in non-UI mode (since we won't need that). If no connections are made to 'kuiserver', which would be in the event that Plasma did not connect to it, it will know that the only way the status for jobs can get shown is if it does it itself. So, 'kuiserver' will relay all of the data on any jobs, to both Plasma's DataEngine, and my progress-in-icons-thing. I then have to make the Plasma DataEngine reflect these new changes. From there I will begin actually drawing the progress onto the icons.

The majority of this goal, is dealing with the back end of things...

Since the actual painting of the progress will be done in kdelibs, anything that would want to take advantage of it, would be able to turn it on with the flip of a switch.

Naturally all of this is subject to change and as such, I would like to have some opinions on it, so comments are warmly welcomed.

Updates will be posted here and for anyone concerned or wants to look at the code or what have you, I am working on it in the kde repo, at: "/branches/work/sok-progress-in-icons/runtime/kuiserver". Naturally, I will have to add more branch-nisms relative to my SoK folder

Kudos goes to TheBlackCat for his mock ups, which are very eye-catchy (at least to me).