Hi all,

I really appreciate the work done in Ktorrent, however I hope that it's not too impolite if I say that there's still much space to improve the UI. Here are some suggestions:

1) The Search plugin:
It wastes too much space IMO - have a look at Firefox' or Konqueror's search fields, especially their way to select search service. Another thing which currently is suboptimal is the "Search" button: it might be difficult for some people to recognize that it belongs to the Search-Lineedit; again have a look how Firefox (not Konqueror this time) does that.

2) The "Groups"-sidebar:
The "Groups"-button far left wastes space, as it is the only button in this bar. Have a look how e.g. Akregator realizes showing/hiding sidebar.

3) The core of the UI - the torrent list:
What I do not like at it:
* It's too wide and thereby causes ugly horizontal scrollbars appear.
* Users with only few torrents in it waste a lot of vertical space; nevertheless they must scroll (horizontally) to see all content
* [edit] I did a quick test with QtDesigner under Windows, to see if it supports text embedded in a progress bar - it did not (only next to it). It should be cleared if that's really impossible (for Mac OS, too - I couldn't test it). [/edit]

What I propose is to change the vspace/hspace ratio, I think it gets clear when you see this mockup I created:


(Of course that would require a "View"-menu to be added, where you can then set the sorting method.)

Disadvantages of my suggestion:
* Code gets more complex, as current implementation only uses standard widgets while my proposal wouldn't
* Users with many torrents could have a worse overview as less items get shown at the same time (in other words: they must scroll vertically because the needed vspace is higher)

So what I actually propose is to provide both, the "plain (aka classic) view" and the "graphic view" (last one would be default). The possibility to toggle between them could be added to the new "View"-menu. (The downside is that there would be even more code to maintain.)

I'd be glad if you took my suggestions into consideration. Best regards,

gissi

I was actually thinking (in the back of my head) about something similar, and I think it would KTorrent much cleaner and good-looking, and with the already existing killer featureset, this would make KTorrent the absolutely best torrent app on the planet;)

gissi wrote:Hi all,

I really appreciate the work done in Ktorrent, however I hope that it's not too impolite if I say that there's still much space to improve the UI. Here are some suggestions:

1) The Search plugin:
It wastes too much space IMO - have a look at Firefox' or Konqueror's search fields, especially their way to select search service.

Indeed that is an option to improve it that way, don't know however if Qt supports this.

Another thing which currently is suboptimal is the "Search" button: it might be difficult for some people to recognize that it belongs to the Search-Lineedit; again have a look how Firefox (not Konqueror this time) does that.

Seeing that they managed to stuff in a clear button in line edits, this might be possible.

2) The "Groups"-sidebar:
The "Groups"-button far left wastes space, as it is the only button in this bar. Have a look how e.g. Akregator realizes showing/hiding sidebar.

The button isn't that big, and I want to be able to add more to the left sidebar in the future.

3) The core of the UI - the torrent list:
What I do not like at it:
* It's too wide and thereby causes ugly horizontal scrollbars appear.
* Users with only few torrents in it waste a lot of vertical space; nevertheless they must scroll (horizontally) to see all content
* [edit] I did a quick test with QtDesigner under Windows, to see if it supports text embedded in a progress bar - it did not (only next to it). It should be cleared if that's really impossible (for Mac OS, too - I couldn't test it). [/edit]

What I propose is to change the vspace/hspace ratio, I think it gets clear when you see this mockup I created:


(Of course that would require a "View"-menu to be added, where you can then set the sorting method.)

Disadvantages of my suggestion:
* Code gets more complex, as current implementation only uses standard widgets while my proposal wouldn't
* Users with many torrents could have a worse overview as less items get shown at the same time (in other words: they must scroll vertically because the needed vspace is higher)

So what I actually propose is to provide both, the "plain (aka classic) view" and the "graphic view" (last one would be default). The possibility to toggle between them could be added to the new "View"-menu. (The downside is that there would be even more code to maintain.)

I'd be glad if you took my suggestions into consideration. Best regards,

gissi

Actually I have played with similar ideas before (got bored of listviews), even experimented somewhat, but then other stuff started taking up my time, and I pretty much forgot about it.

But my plan was to revive this at some point in the future (after 3.0, probably in 3.1)

Just so a new thread isn't open just for this, would anyone else apreciate the adition of a column called 'tracker' on the torrent list? I realy find usefull the option to order my torrent by tracker.

Thnkz.

Regards.

I'm very new to torrent downloading, so this may simply be me misunderstanding, but trackers keep track of how much you upload and download, correct?

So it would be nice if it were possible to pick trackers and make the torrent follow rules that apply to the tracker, rather than individual files, or maybe both. So you may have a bunch of files with low share ratios, but a file on the same tracker that has a huge share ratio, you could delete or transfer the stuff that isn't getting a lot of play. I'm mainly thinking of the idea of wanting to keep ratios up, but also regaining hard drive space.

If the above already exists, I apologize.

Another thing, for people who have a lot of hard drives, hate noise, and want to make a lot of their stuff available: Have 1 or 2 hard drives for active torrents and a file that says what's on the other hard drives. So, if someone wants something that's super rare, or hasn't been active for a long time, they have a better chance of being able to get it. The hard drive would spin up, send it to the hard drive and spin down. You wouldn't delete it on the temporarily active hard drive, you'd just have two copies for a little while. You might also have separate rules for people who want to use solid state drives, it's more fun to support p2p if you can have huge loud hard drives that aren't on a lot of the time.

jasong wrote:I'm very new to torrent downloading, so this may simply be me misunderstanding, but trackers keep track of how much you upload and download, correct?

Correct, this info is given in the announce.

So it would be nice if it were possible to pick trackers and make the torrent follow rules that apply to the tracker, rather than individual files, or maybe both. So you may have a bunch of files with low share ratios, but a file on the same tracker that has a huge share ratio, you could delete or transfer the stuff that isn't getting a lot of play. I'm mainly thinking of the idea of wanting to keep ratios up, but also regaining hard drive space.

If the above already exists, I apologize.

You mean that your ratio does not need to be on a certain level for each torrent? This is tracker rules only side stuff imo. KTorrent should leave it alone.