[IDEA] Easy, Beautiful Progress Notifications in KDE's Task Bar

NOTE: Please *vote* on this idea here!

At the moment, apps can let us see how far through a task they are, such as Dolphin with it's file copy progress bar. The problem is that:

1. There's no obvious link between the different programs and where their progress is shown (in a small, minimised, generic system tray applet marked "i")
2. The systray applet either hides that anything is happening if minimised, or covers a pretty large section of screen to show only a small amount of information if maximised.
3. Strangely it is currently set to show for the first few seconds and then "dissapear" (minimise to the system tray). More than one user I know has pulled a flash drive still being written to thinking the copy was finished. Even if you understand it you're stuck with point 2 above.
   

If you're copying in Dolphin or burning a CD in K3B, wouldn't you prefer to have a beautiful looking progress bar that is economical with screen space, needs no big pop up windows, looks great and always gives you feedback, right on the application's taskbar entry?



This mockup is designed to show mainly the TaskBar (although I've included a tooltip in the mockup, too). This is just Dolphins, flash drive capacity bar, scaled and set to 80% opacity. If needed it could be used in addition to the current system. If you're copying three things at once it could show the progress of the combined tasks and still let people click on the "i" only if they want a more detailed breakdown. The bar could just fade in when used, and once finished could fade out once that app is given focus.

NOTE: Please *vote* on this idea here!

I Love You, But...

Dear Google:

I love you, I really do. You give Microsoft a run for their money along with their (increasingly) underling Yahoo. You pay wads of students and hackers to spiff up many of my favourite applications each summer and you host this blog. You're even hosting the release party for my favourite project of the year, the very delicious KDE4. All accounts so far are that your food at the release event was equally delicious, which is why I feel a little uncomfortable mentioning something that's been leaving a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth lately...

If you really want to support us, how about officially supporting our venerable, standards based browser Konqueror?

I understand that there are a million browsers and it doesn't make good sense to support all of them. If you're wanting to support open source though, there's really only two dominant desktop environments though and that's Gnome and KDE. Your support for Gnome's Firefox is exemplary. Heck you even pay people to pimp it for you! (cheers!) But how many people are able to use KDE's official browser to use your services (particularly maps, reader, earth etc)? I don't know, and I'm betting that you don't either because anyone stubborn enough to try and plough through on your sites with our beloved Konqi soon has to change their browser identification to either Safari or Mozilla to get most things to work.

Don't get me wrong, like a needy lover I keep coming back to you even when you treat Konqi bad. You're still smart, sexy and generally do a lot of good imho. I also don't expect Firefox levels of support. Plain old Safari levels would be nice. But then, maybe, just maybe, you knew if you gave enough good food at GoogleHQ, that the community would just do it ourselves.

So Google, I do love you (please don't disable my Adsense account). Now, how about giving Konqi a bit of that love back...


PS If you feel the same (and aren't Google!) I highly recommend passing the message on to Google by clicking here and choosing "No" under "Was this information helpful". You can then enter a short message about this! Go gettem! :-D