The two bars on the status tab that show which parts of the file have been downloaded and are available are interesting to look at, but maybe could be adjusted to show a bit more useful information.

My suggestion is to shade the bar using colours, so that the chunks are coloured depending on what file they belong to. Where that part of the bar is long enough, the name of the file could be overlaid on the bar. This way a user could look at the bar and quickly see which files are available.

This appearance would be similar to using the kfilesize kpart in Konqueror.

That's an interesting idea, it has some practical problems, like what color to use when we have a torrent with 1000 or more files ?

When there are more chunks then there are pixels we make the colors lighter and darker to indicate how much of the chunks of that pixel we have, how will we handle this with different colors ? Because we obviously cannot have a file with light blue color and one with dark blue, this would be confusing.

A torrent with that many files would probably be divided into directories. I suppose if the files are too small to show, their directories could be shown instead.

I'm including a shot of kfilesizepart showing a bittorrent download with a typical number of files.



In the kfilesizepart shot, the display is obviously 2D instead of 1D like the bar in KTorrent, but the idea could be adapted.

For shading, not every file would need a different colour... about five colours would do. There would be a light version of each colour for partially downloaded. So long as the five colours are all about the same darkness to start with I don't think this would be a major problem.

I like your idea really. I understand what you're saying with this screenshot but our chunkbars are way to smaller than this to support all this information.

Though we could use 2 colors for files, for example C1 and C2. First one will be colored C1, the next one (adjaced) will be colored C2 etc...

Something like this for example:

That is a really good idea, i like Ivan's solution, practical and more usefull IMO.

I do ask myself though, if we wouldn't get into problems with the length of the filenames when there are too many files in the torrent.

I do ask myself though, if we wouldn't get into problems with the length of the filenames when there are too many files in the torrent.

Offcourse we would

Many files in torrent, as well as very small ones (.nfo for example) will cause troubles. We could, for example, skip painting filename if there's no space for X characters. Long filenames could be truncated like "verylongfilena..."

Ivan wrote:Something like this for example:

Now this I really like! Tasteful, compact, useful, familiar - nice!

Another neat thing that could be added: If a file isn't being downloaded because the user chose not to get that one, the area on the bar could that would usually be white be coloured black to show you aren't interested in it.

It could also have functions. For example, right-click on "file3.ext" and get a context menu with "do not download this file" as an option.

Ivan wrote:

I do ask myself though, if we wouldn't get into problems with the length of the filenames when there are too many files in the torrent.

Offcourse we would

Many files in torrent, as well as very small ones (.nfo for example) will cause troubles. We could, for example, skip painting filename if there's no space for X characters. Long filenames could be truncated like "verylongfilena..."

Tooltips could solve this partially, we would have to change the tooltip each time the mouse is moved, but it can be done.