GSoC with KDE: Coding Period Week 1 and 2
Table of contents
Introduction:
For the first two weeks of the coding period, the aim was to have the basic UI for the Email Composition ready. UI design has been implemented and the PR is currently under review.
Week 1:
Before the start of the coding period I had a call with one of my mentors Carl, he gave me good guidance and suggestions on which aspect to focus first and also gave me a few resources to use as a reference which was a good starting point for me. My first task involved looking into how and where I could launch my Email Composition window from. At first, I looked at Menu actions but that seemed to not work and later got it to work by launching it from ToolBar actions. During the process, I got to learn how actions work and how powerful they are. Then I started working on the design of the UI trying to make it as close to my proposed mockup. During this I realized how powerful 'grep' is, whenever I got stuck somewhere I would start grepping and try to connect the dots as to how different aspects of the codebase worked together along with going through the documentation and code examples and by the end of the first week I managed to have a basic structure ready.
Week 2:
This week was more focused on adding the remaining aspects of the UI. I started by adding the send button. I tried out a few different icons to use with the send button and also got the community's review on the general UI, in the end, the 'document-send' breeze icon was selected to be used as a send button. In addition 'document-import' for attachments and 'user-trash' for delete icons were also used. Next, the focus was on adding the 'CC' and 'BCC' fields. At this point I also had a call with Carl to update him about my weekly progress, he also suggested me a much better approach than my initial attempt. By the end of this week, the UI of the Email composition was complete.
Also, I would like to thank both my mentors Claudio and Carl for their constant support and special thanks to Carl for taking time out of his schedule to hop on video calls with me and clear my doubts.