need an idea for kxkb (multiple variants UI)

[John Tapsell]

Maybe you could overlay the text onto the picture of the flag?

Although going off a bit, but for kde4 I would very much like to see
kxkb and skim (asian keyboard switcher) merged (if only visually into
one app).  :-)



On 2/28/06, Andriy Rysin <arysin at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> In 3.5.1there was feature introduced (though broken) to kxkb to allow
> switch same layouts with different variants.
> For 3.5.2 the problems with it will be fixed (along with couple of
> others) but there's one little thing to do: somehow show different
> variants in a tray.
> Currently user sees only (first part of the) layout code and (possibly)
> flag. One can see full name of current layout and the variant in
> tooltip. But it would be more natural if user could see the difference
> between same layout and different variants.
>
> There also three things to keep in mind:
> 1) we're in message freeze so no new messages could be added
> 2) we're pretty tight with space, especially if flag is used the
> visibility of the text is at its limit
> 3) the code change should be pretty small as we're close to 3.5.2
>
> I have only one idea: currently the flag max height is 14 and tiny size
> of taskbar is 25. So we could potentially move flag up and use 7-8
> pixels below to show several letters of variant name or its abbreviated
> name (in case several variants start with same letters). I was going to
> make this change only when there's the same layout with different
> variants so users which don't use that won't see the change. Also if
> multiple variants are used we could disable showing flag by default to
> increase visibility (flags have much less sense in these cases anyway).
>
> I am going to have some time to provide UI for this feature later this
> week but I'd like to hear any suggestions and comment before I start coding.
>
> Thanks a lot,
> Andriy
>
> P.S. I am also open to suggestions for KDE4 where we could make more
> radical changes
>