Shaun Reich (sreich)

Plasma SVG Viewer Tool

2012-01-22T22:15:00.001-05:00

About a week ago I got this random idea. Though I suppose that's what most of my ideas are (I say this as I have quite a few branches for various projects, at the moment ;)

I thought about creating an SVG viewer for Plasma. It's more like an explorer in the sense that it is similar in kin to the current Plasma tools (plasmaenginexplorer, plasmoidviewer), except this one is meant to show a list of themes and the various SVGz's it supports, as well as what they look like. So of course, bare in mind it's not something every user should use, just like plasmaengineexplorer and friends.

Mind you, it's still a work in progress and I'm not exactly sure where I want to go with this, but I figured it might be useful for somebody who is either constructing themes, or want to browse Plasma's available SVGs easily, especially needed if you are using QML a lot.

And of course the obligatory image of awesomeness in true Plasma fashion, showing our beautiful clocks:

As always, I'm completely open to suggestions, as I can't decide on what I should be adding, how to improve it...and if anybody would find this useful, and how it could be better at serving that purpose.

In explanation of the image, you can see at the top is the current Plasma::Theme that's selected via dropdown box (e.g. I have about 20 of them installed..).

The left pane represents the SVG files, I broke them down into a treeview so they're easy to see everything in for example, desktoptheme//widgets/

And obviously the right side is the preview of the current svg, in a scrollable view.

I had in mind to add a list somewhere which shows all of the subelements/prefixes, like "hover", "arrow-right", etc. etc. which are svg file specific. But I wasn't sure on how the UI would be laid out without looking terrible.

Also had in mind to add a button to open the current one in e.g. Inkscape.

Hopefully somebody finds this somewhat useful, mostly Plasma theme creators...

Plasma Sesssion Applets in QML

2012-01-08T23:50:00.001-05:00

Now that 4.8 is tagged and should be heading downstream someday soonish, I figured why not post some details on neat shiny improvements that won't be in it, but instead the 0.5 year from now 4.9 release, just to give you something to look forward to ;-)

In the spirit of spreading QML to everything in Plasma as best we can as well, I've now merged my WIP Konqueror as well as the Konsole session applet widgets. Or, profiles as they are sometimes called. It's a simple scenario, but I just moved the logic out from the applet into their own DataEngines and did all the UI stuff in QML.

Here's a screenshot showing what the old style one (kate, right-most widget) looked like when compared to the new (2 left-most) widgets. The old ones had non-plasma decorations and didn't fit in the workspace very well.

Konsole and Konq QML applets vs Kate old style applet

They both use QML now as opposed to C++ and they're in kdeplasm-addons master. There are still some bugs in it, you can probably spot it, but I'm migrating it over to using Plasma QML Components and as a result it ends up testing the integrity of the components.

The list is flickable as well as scrollable, (the scrollbars are provided by Plasma Components). Something that I'm going to do as well, is add more features to these widgets, like ability to display icons of the sessions, and probably delete/add sessions; whatever seems practical. The QML version now matches the C++ ones in terms of functionality.

Additionally, I've been hacking quite a bit in Plasma lately. For starters, I'm going to create QML versions of the Kate profiles applet, and introduce the non-existent(I think) KDevelop sessions applet.

Secondly, I've been working on picking up maintenance of the system-monitor applets (CPU, Net, HDD space, RAM, etc.) so I've fixed a good amount of bugs from them so far and counting. Hopefully I can bring the bug count of these applets from 40 to 0, or at least somewhere in between ;)
I've been killing some other plasma widget bugs too and after I'm "done" focusing on the system monitor widgets, I'll turn my gaze to some other widget I find interesting (non-existent or otherwise), not to mention if I feel like porting some more widgets to QML (which is something we're ultimately trying to do now in Plasma).

That said, I'd like (good) suggestions on ways to improve these applets for everyone, as I'm not *too* happy with their present states.

Also, on top of the other stuff I'm hacking on, I also have a branch in kde-workspace for creating a Hard Disk Activity Monitor to monitor HDD I/O (throughput). That's something that I've wanted for a long time now and I've heard other people wanting it as well.

I'd also love to see that support be native in KSysGuard as well; I dislike the fact that to use it you need to download an external tab, since it's a key element of any good system monitor. So I'll either bribe the relevant people to get that done, or do it myself if I get the time...

Back in Black

2011-05-07T21:14:00.000-04:00

(warning: This is a boring, non-code-related blog post. As such, feel free skip ;-)

Well I have some even better news than my last blog post, through just a random idea I had (after seeing it online)...

Apparently I am, in essence, "allergic" to milk products. After going without milk for about 2 days, I realized my migraines were almost entirely gone. So now I am avoiding *anything* which contains milk in it (cheeses, chocolates, etc. etc.).

The issue was basically, that my diet used to consist largely of milk; that is, milk in the morning for cereal, milk for lunch, and milk with dinner with possibly some icecream ;-p

So now that I try to avoid everything which has milk in it, it's looking like my migraines are gone (I'm going to ease off some of this medication to verify it). I feel kind of silly for having to go through all of this when it was something as simple as drinking milk; no loss though, in the end I am happy about the direction this is going. But you would be surprised at how many products contain it, even. I took it for granted, it seems :)
I'm not really sure the whole story as to what this means, but it appears everything is getting quite good.

Now as an alternative to milk, I drink Rice Milk. Which is incidentally, not as bad tasting as one might think. In fact, I really enjoy the taste of it. It tastes almost like how milk tastes after I've had Rice Krispy's in the cereal. So I can now use this for breakfast. Good stuff, surprisingly.

Oh, I also upgraded my computer -- I went from a Core2Duo @ 2.6 GHz with 2 GiB of RAM, to an AMD Phenom II x6 @ 2.8 GHz (6 cores), 4 GiB of RAM, and a Raid-0 configuration. The performance jump is really amazing, and I'm quite happy I made the purchase. I did so on a budget too, and this CPU was the best high-end CPU that I wanted for a great price. Plus, I want to do my part in making sure that AMD stays a valid competitor to Intel, otherwise we...the consumer, are screwed ;-)

I even bought a cheap $20 Chiclet keyboard. You know, the kind that iMacs now ship with (iirc). Anyways, I'm really loving the feel of typing on it, it's very soothing to the fingers. For that price too, it is a good quality which I wasn't expecting. I'm glad I played Russian Roulette :)

I'm sure soon my life will be back to normal shortly, if the present course holds well. I'm currently doing some studying for finals week as well.

Well, back to coding.

KDM Plasma: Good News Everyone!

2011-04-26T01:57:00.000-04:00

After a long "absence", lack of blog entries, and too much code not being written...I am finally able to resume (to some extent), those things...or...the opposite of those things, rather.

Although I am still searching for the best migraine medications, my current combinations are working decently enough to allow me more hours instead of having to sleep for the whole day. The good news is that it there isn't anything "severely" wrong with me. Unfortunately, to search for the right medicine, there's a period where it regresses, until I discover that the medicine either works or doesn't; and it takes many weeks to know that The good news is that they're less severe generally, I'd say, as well as being less frequent. I still have not had a day without them for 9+ months or so. So, don't get the impression that I'm purposely avoiding KDE ;)

Okay, now exciting part: some updates on KDM-Plasma. First of all, not too long ago I got it to the point where it was possible to login. That was pretty sweet.
Well, now I have some infrastructure changes I am going to be working on. Most importantly, I've decided to now make KDM-Plasma support QML. By "support", I mean that it will
be using it, exclusively. (well, I suppose you could use C++ for it instead...if you're nuts).

What does it mean when I say KDM-Plasma will be using QML? Well, KDM will take one Plasmoid and stretch it to the size of the scene. This applet will be written in QML/Javascript,
and it will be able to access the DataEngines. There will be one main DataEngine, which will have the general data sources like the sessions available, the userlist, etc. etc. Then there will additionally, be n numbers of authentication plugins. The idea is to separate it from the previous concept whereby the Plasmoid effectively *is* the authentication plugin as well as the creator of the UI. This of course had drawbacks in terms ease of customization (how many times do you want to change the authentication plugin through code, as opposed to just changing the look).

So, just to sum it up: DataEngines/Services (in addition to the Main one) are now serving as authentication plugins. The QML applets can pick which one it wants to use, and it should be relatively easy and require not much intervention in terms of getting it to work. It will have to do -something-, to an extent, in logic, but 99% of this will be in the DataEngine, and the 1% that needs to talk to the DataEngine authentication will be the applet. The DataEngines are essentially a "write once and probably never worry about it again", much like the current KDM plugins are (classic, winbind, generic, (unofficially fingerprint)). Hope that makes sense. I haven't thought about how to break apart the API nicely, but I'm working on it now...

QML should make it exceptionally easy for someone to write a Plasmoid, ) which takes up the entire screen, remember) - and therefore it will be "in charge" of anything it wants to. (e.g. you can place a billion buttons all over the place and stuff like that). Right now, I have a PathView incorporated into it for the userlist, which you can flick and click. That's just for the applet I'm working on. You can do whatever you want for the QML applet you want to do. So, this allows *absolutely simple* branding, UI redesign, as well as fun animations, to make it feel more alive and less stale/static.

Well, if any of you know QML, or want to learn it...feel free to impress me with neat themes and their animations, etc. (I suppose that's the best word for them)! You can actually create one right now just through qmlviewer...and I would just port it over later. In fact, I'd love it if you did...it'd give me some more ideas as well as give me more to include with KDM). If you care to follow through with that, feel free to contact me if you need help or what not.

Bad News Everyone!

It will not be making it into KDE 4.7, it everything ends up freezing around mid-May, so there's no way I can get it in by then. And I'm too much of a perfectionist to rush it, especially with something as important as this; don't want any security implications and what not, and I don't want to give a bad impression in terms of Plasma being used in KDM. Polish, polish, polish.

By the way, I have moved this code to Git now, which I am really liking, especially because of the offline way it treats things (admittedly I have only used small features), so feel free to clone/watch/poke at it. Link: Quick Git (this is my branch of kde-workspace, and I affect the ./kdm/plasmafrontend/ directory).

My GSOC (kdm-plasma) status

2010-08-24T10:48:00.001-04:00

Well, I have a lot of it done, but still have a lot that I would love to do. Basically to get it into a working state, I have to "port" one (for now) authentication plugin into a plasmoid..which shouldn't be entirely difficult, to be functional that is. Aestheticism and intuitiveness is a different story. I'll have to do all of the above when I can find the time...I have managed to get the shutdown, and unlock dialogs to work nicely. Which involved a little more than one may think..trying to find the best way to have the items laid out to make it look pretty..actually transforming that to qgraphicslayout-ese. I also had to design it so that said dialogs would ask for the root password when needed (obviously the unlock dialog will always have that..but the shutdown one is conditional, depending on the kdm configuration file).

The dialogs kind of..segregate other tasks, from the dialogs themselves. In other words, the "modal dialogs", when shown...will "hide" everything else (technically it switches to a different Plasma::Containment), meaning that you do not get that ugly "dialog z ordered above a dialog/on top of" problem that someone mentioned in a blog that I don't feel like digging up. I like it. It makes the user more focused with the decision at hand.

I would post some (half-baked) screenshots, but I guess I will give them to Lydia so she can post her dot story, when I get an opportunity to do so. So I suppose you could just check dot.kde.org for that, along with updates on the other GSOC'ers

Lately I've been so cramped on time..I've been getting stuff ready for college (before you ask: yes, it was my usual last-minute stuff ;-)

I took and - barely passed my road test. I even did something I have never...ever done before: I set it to Reverse instead of Forwards. So I was actually looking ahead..I only moved a little bit, but still. To be fair to myself though, I'm a very, very nervous person when it comes to..I guess...social events. From a test in school, first day in school/whatever, and many other simple things..or at least, what one would think would be simple. My brain just completely shuts down in these moments. (which is why I generally like the over-the-net approach to talking. My thoughts are more...gathered, this way).

The worst part is, when this happens, I can't eat breakfast at all..if I do I _will_ vomit.. Actually, even if I don't I might. I had that happen yesterday morning, and all that was in my stomach was stomach acids (sorry if you're squeamish).

Then we had a storm (which had a tornado touch down somewhere semi-nearby..although the winds were really strong), which ripped apart our fence and our neighbors' trees (ours were fine surprisingly..mostly branches).

Oh, and the best part?

I've been having horrible headaches for *counts*...I think this is the third week.

Yes. Continuous.

The headaches tend to get *very* bad during the evening hours...and it spikes quite rapidly with no real warning...in fact, the first week I've constantly been tricked into thinking it was gone, as I couldn't feel anything during the first few hours. But then around 13:00 I could tell that it was still semi-there. Then it goes on to being horrible pain right around 18:00.

I've seen two doctors so far, one gave me pain pills (luckily), and the most recent one gave me low blood pressure pills (although my blood pressure is typically low || normal)...the latter pills are supposed to "prevent" the headaches in the first place, since he believes they are tension/cluster headaches, as far as I understand. The doctor doesn't believe that I need an MRI or anything like that. I have noticed that my jaw muscles, neck, and the area on my temple (each side) does hurt. At least it does today...I've had that part only be noticeable one other time during this sequence, though.

Yeah, it's gotten so bad that I haven't been able to bring myself to write code anymore since ... well, just about their onset (which is very significant, considering I always have some urge to do it...in fact, it's usually all I do, nearly all day, too).

Now that college classes have begun, I have to sit through the classes...and receive get homework which I can't bring myself to do...especially math homework. (if I don't want to code why would I want to do math...since thinking with a headache seems to be one of the things that likes to make it worse). Or at the very least, not being able to think clearly.

Wow this entry grew large quite quickly ;-)

I think I'm going to take a nap. In between the drowsy-affects of 3 medications (1 was a today-only pain medication..) and the lack of sleep from school, then the lack of sleep from the anticipation of school...I'm really tired today.

nouveau and Liking It

2010-06-30T03:21:00.000-04:00

So yesterday I felt the impulse to give nouveau a shot. For anyone who doesn't know, that's the project with the goal of creating a FOSS for Nvidia graphics cards. Well, as I was installing it -- and even before that, I really had my doubts. After reading endlessly how "2D is in a basic state but 3D is experimental", I predicted that I would have to quickly revert back to the binary blobs before I could get back to my coding work..

That said, I was blown away when I tweaked my X.Org config file a bit and it worked just how I wanted. Well, for the most part anyways. 2D is very fast and overall it's far less laggy for me than it was with the Nvidia drivers. I always experienced lag with them that nobody else seemed to...either I'm sensitive to lag (possible, since I am quite a gamer) or it's because I'm running multiple screens. Or maybe I just have bad luck.

My graphics card is a 7950 GX2 whose performance is slightly better than the 8600 GT's with the closed-source drivers...and it was *still* jumpy, slow and delayed, etc. etc.

Compositing works well -- I had expected it to not. In fact, my kwin effects work perfectly, including: highlight windows, transparency, present windows (that's a big one for me as I use it all the time), and shadows. The only effects I have encountered which does not work, is Blur and some other one that I can't remember the name of (obviously it wasn't particularly important).

Changing tabs, scrolling, window dragging, it's all super smooth. In fact, it was so smooth that when I first logged in and dragged a window's tab around, and minimized a window, I couldn't believe that I had been missing out on this for so long. Really, it has been a long time...I don't know how I survived. It's that much of a difference :)

I must say, I'm very happy, and I hope the nouveau developers keep up their excellent work. It really helps make KDE a better experience.

KDM-Plasma - Update

2010-06-18T20:00:00.000-04:00

Hm...where should I begin...

Oh, right. I've been accepted to GSoC 2010 to work on this very project, which is very cool for me, as it means I can work full time on kde over the summer.

I'll describe a few bits as to where I currently am on this project - as quite a few people have been bugging me about updates to it ;-)

So far, I have a good majority of the Plasma::DataEngine & Plasma::Service completed, so this will allow kdm applets to easily be created. The DataEngine was probably where the bulk of the work was (quite a bit even now).

I don't think I've mentioned this, but a while back I got Plasma to run in kdm, and it runs quite well. Even the Marble wallpaper plugin works on it. :p

I also have multiscreen handling in a usable state in it. It's in need of more refinement, but that will come later. (I have 2 LCD screens so I can test it easily/well).

I have been stripping out the previous kdm "plugin system", which essentially allows a new plugin to be written for each authentication type. The actual login dialog would embed the QWidget that the plugin provides.

This does/did not fit our needs and it would just hinder the move to Plasma - not to mention by design, it cannot really offer the most consistent ui (since it is not in charge of all aspects). So, by removing that, we can have 100% native Plasma::Applets/QGraphicsWidgets.

I am currently working on making a replacement for the message boxes and the shutdown dialog.

Why, might you wonder?

Because not only does their presentation bring you out of Plasma-Heaven(yes, it's a place ;) they also have the issue of a "dialog appearing on top of a dialog" which I am quite unfond of in this context.

The message box replacement will be a Plasma-esque one. When a message box has to be displayed, it could slide in from the side (kudos to aseigo for the idea) and push the rest of the screen out of the way. When it's job is done, it can slide back and be done with it.

Also, I've read some of this which puts forth some valid points, and I will address the ones that I can.

I think that covers just about everything..

KDM and Plasma: A future.

2010-01-05T22:01:00.000-05:00

It's surprising to me to think that in 17 days I will be 18. Not really a big deal though as I have always disliked birthday parties (only enjoyed the chocolate cake..oh yes..the chocolate cake).
Now that this is my senior year, I am anxious to get out of high school, yet dread the amount of work involved with college, which would inevitably leave me with *less* time for kde.

By the way, if anyone is wondering what happened to my summer of kde project ("progress in icons"), it's been finished but I had missed the deadline to commit it to 4.4 (due to homework and other busyness), so it will show up in 4.5.

Anyways, now that I've forced you to read all of that..I'd like to talk about KDM and Plasma combining forces. Well, since I always need to be coding something, regardless of whether or not I have any free-time, I have (begun to plan out and create(began today), a Plasma frontend for our login manager, kdm. Before anyone begins shaking their fists in the air and such, I must stress this...The Plasma frontend will be *optional*. So if you dislike Plasma *that* much for some reason or are close-minded (perhaps mutually inclusive?): the regular, currently used frontend can be used.

Using Plasma with it offers many many benefits, I won't cover *everything* here, merely illustrate a nice overview of what's to come..

First of all, Standards. With kdm and the desktop(and the screensaver too!) using the same theming system, themes for one are easily made available for another. Not only does this grant a unified look throughout the desktop(yeah, I used it in two different contexts ;-) , but it also means that it is less of a burden on artists. You know, the kind people who design the themes.

That really helps to lighten their load in some of the ways that Qt has lightened our load with the "Write once, compile everywhere" methodology. Not only that, it also means that you do not have people forgetting (or simply not doing, due to the added work) themes for kdm...it gets a piece of the cake(mhmm) too, automatically. So this should mean that we will receive more themes that are awesome, all free of charge.

I imagine that people would love to have different themes for the login manager and the desktop. e.g. a black-themed one for kdm and Air for their desktop (I know I would/do) - so that will also be available..

Line edits, button mouseover, click events and more, will all look nice and at home with the rest of the system. Effects from Plasma can also be given to it...

Wallpapers will be fun also..so this means that instead of changing the theme just to get a different wallpaper, you can specify your own. Whether it be any of the wallpaper plugins and stuff that Plasma can provide or your own image, you can tailor it to your every whim.

Of course, the most important part: Widgets. All kinds of widgets could be used (the ones that make sense to use in a login manager, of course). From a clock, battery monitor, the kdm greeter (of course. you know, the login dialog), system monitors, disc usage, sticky notes, calculator, on-screen keyboard (especially important), and of course there are always more - so get out there and write widgets! write!

All in all, KDM using Plasma should help give the user direct, simple, and intuitive control.

For those of you who are worried, Oswald Buddenhagen (kdm maintainer) is planning on getting kdm to run as non-root.

Well, back to slaving over some hot code..

Progress In Icons -- Status Update

2009-07-03T02:30:00.000-04:00

I haven't blogged in a while...generally it's because I prefer to blog about big changes and what not. I have however, been steadily working on the project, achieving some nice ground work despite being entangled with real life. School is finally over after I had to study some more for the "fun" NYS Regents exams. Of which, I have had 3 this summer. This time it wasn't that bad though, they weren't as heartless as they were before, having two or even three, if I recall correctly, in one day. This time it was also spaced out by days between tests. State-mandated standardized testing at it's best, with the education system happily squeezing us into a mindset of learning/caring to only that which is on aforementioned test(s). *sigh*

To get straight to it..the whole deal about kuiserver being a relay for jobs, is..I daresay, pretty much done--at least on the plasma dataengine, and kuiserver's side of things. After many moments of me fighting with DBus, I am finally starting to get the hang of it. At one point, I compiled it and the dataengine, restarted plasma, started kuiserver, started a transfer, and was greeted with the awesome plasma notification. Hurrah, it works...It is kind of disheartening to think that there is really nothing to show for it, however, since to a normal person, "it did that before anyways", and you can't really take screenshots of a backend..well, I suppose you could, but what's the point? ;)

After I do some more tidying up--I still have to fiddle with CMake some more, to make kuiserver start whenever a call is sent to it, via D-Bus. Following this, I will pop a mail to the kde-core-devel and plasma-devel mailing lists, to get it reviewed for merging back into trunk, I would like to see any mistakes that I have made, as I am sure there are some, considering I am quite new to all of this, be it C++, Qt, DBus(IPC), and especially the model-view, which at some points seems to work via magic. Not necessarily in a good way, the kind of magic that you have no idea how it works, and you hope that tweaking and changing it a bit won't make it turn into Dark Magic..etc. With luck, we will catch any of those mistakes before it is sent off into the big bad world that is the people running trunk (me, for one) ;p

Well, what next? Most likely, creating the actual client that will obtain the information from the now-finished, kuiserver, and we will be painting the progress onto the icons in no time. This should be copy and paste initially, with a bunch of tweaks, to get a client up and running to ask kuiserver for the list of jobs. With said job list, it should then be able to figure out what needs to be painted on the current view, and Just Do It. It would be interesting to see what it will turn out like, how I will go about the process of doing it, or what it even *should* look like. Maybe some more glancings of the mockups could give me some ideas, and hopefully prevent me from creating some big oversight. The client will have to be somewhere near the KDirModel, no idea where yet.
So yeah, not sure what to name the client files, I am also unsure what to name the method that will be an optional call, to enable showing the progress in icons. This would be so that, for example, Dolphin could just pass this method a bool (true) to enable it, not having to worry about it any further. Well, all of these are just details derived from the bigger picture.

I also would kind of like to showcase (after this is in a semi-working state, obviously), what it looks like in action, in a screencast--since movies are so much more leet than pictures, or words, even. I have never done a screencast before, so I suppose that could be some fun, along with showing all of you what is in store for you at some point in time. All in due time..

P.S. Stupid blogger, it wouldn't let me set the time posted to the *actual* time I posted it at, I had to set it back a few hours.. *sigh*

SoK Project - Showing Job Progress In Icons

2009-05-10T21:16:00.000-04:00

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).