Animated labels and progress bars in Oxygen considered harmful?

[Hugo Pereira Da Costa]

Hi Aurelien,

I'd like to get others input on the QLabel thing (I'm surprised by "few 
seconds" though. In fact tooltip labels are animated to but it takes 
normally a couple of hundred milliseconds for the text to be updated in 
a smooth way there). Now well, yeah. We can dump it ... It does look 
good for some apps (e.g openbrain plasmoid), but creates quite some 
issues on others ... sad enough.

I can comment on progressbars though. In fact the konqueror progress bar 
also shows the same weirdness when loading some pages: this is due to 
the fact that when you set a new value to a progressbar, the style 
cannot know whether this is a new "progress" (for the same process) or a 
"reset" when a new process to starts.

One way around that I can think of is to only animate progress bar if 
you move forward (increasing progress), and respond instantly if you 
move backward. That would fix the weirdness you mention at least. But it 
might be too "specialized" (meaning: I'm sure there must be at least one 
application on the market that uses progressbars backwards. From 100 to 
0) ...
What do you think ?

Hugo

> Hi,
>
> This evening I was busy polishing the tooltips which appear over
> Gwenview tooltips (current ones are a bit crappy). These tooltips are
> implemented using QLabel instead of QToolTip because QLabel provide
> precise positioning.
>
> One of the bugs I noticed was that when the mouse moved from item1 to
> item2, the tooltip label would be immediatly moved to item2, but it
> would still display item1 text for a few seconds.
>
> It turned out this was caused by the Oxygen widget style animating the
> change of label text. I can probably work around this by using a custom
> widget instead of a QLabel, but I believe it would be the wrong fix.
> Oxygen goes too far in my opinion, and should not try to animate labels
> behind the developer's back.
>
> The "Animated progress bars" option is also probably problematic as I
> guess it is the cause of the strange behavior of the "Get Hot New Stuff"
> dialog (if you click "Install" on several items in a short while, the
> progress bar goes back and forth).
>
> I would suggest removing label and possibly progress bar animations
> because they are bound to cause problems with quite a few applications,
> and it should be up to the developer to decide whether it makes sense to
> animate the change of text in a label or the change of value in a
> progress bar.
>
> What do you think about this?
>
> Aurélien
>