[Kget] [PATCH] KGet Tray Icon and its Overlay

[Fabian Henze]

On Sunday the 26th April 2009 13:00:39 UTC, Lukas Appelhans wrote:
> > I still think, that a blinking animation is not the right way to go.
> > Maybe we should ask the usability folk?
>
> Yep, I think that'd maybe be nice...

I talked to a few people in freenodes #kde-usability and all of them agreed, 
that blinking is bad, but instead some other process indicator would be a good 
idea. Someone came up with sth. similar to the amarok tray icon (like this 
one: http://g.imagehost.org/0582/amarok_and_kget.png). However its hard to see 
if the song (or the download in our case) is 20% or 80% complete. So he 
suggested to use an overlay, which grows clockwise (using QPainter::drawPie). 
I hope you understand what I am trying to explain ;-)
I am not very good at creating mockups, so I will just try to implement it 
when I have time (most likely on Thursday).
What do you think?

> > I know, but what for? If its just shown one time on an area of 16x16
> > pixels the user wont see it in more than 90% of the cases.
>
> Yeah, but it indicates that kget changed the status... dunno if that makes
> sense after all, but I have to say I like it... :)

I think KGet will change the status only on user request, so he will know 
anyway, no? ^^

> > In my opinion an animation would generate too much CPU wakeups for no
> > good reason.
>
> Well that's a point of opinion, why do we need animations at all etc...? :P

Well imo animations are okay, but they should not be active all the time. 
Matthew Garret wrote a guide to good power management practices, in which he 
writes:
"The hardware used to display a static image on the screen is the same 
regardless of whether the image was generated with the graphics card's 2D or 
3D hardware. Regardless of the number of graphical effects used on the desktop, 
the common case is for the desktop to be static. Composited and traditional 
desktops will generally consume the same amount of power. "
In short this means: If you display an animation all the time, you will keep 
the graphics harware busy.
[source: http://www.codon.org.uk/~mjg59/power/good_practices.html]


-- Fabian Henze
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kget/attachments/20090427/d484b292/attachment.htm