[Panel-devel] Kicker on the Right of the Screen.

[Sébastien Laoût]

Nowaday, more computers come with a 16/9 screen, especially notebooks.
While those sizes are good to watch movies, they are disproportionned for 
desktop usage.
(Or perhapse it's only me who found my new 1280*800 screen a bit 
disproportionned!)
Then I had an idea: put the kicker on the right of the screen, with a width of 
96 pixels.
And this changes everything, for the best.

    See the screenshot of my kicker here:
    http://slaout.linux62.org/kde-wishs/kicker-on-right.png

Usability considerations:
=========================

- Every taskbar button always has the same width, never shrinked to only a few 
pixels. The text visibility does not decrease with the number of opened 
windows.

- Because of that, we do not need a feature such as "Group taskbar buttons", 
which I considere to be a real usability nightmare (no predictable place to 
find taskbar buttons, no way to predict if a window is groupped or not at one 
time, unnefficient two-clicks to raise a window, unefficient menu 
eye-scanning, muscle-memory not usable...).

- Every taskbar button is always at the same predictable place, never moved on 
the left because the buttons on the left have been shrinked.

Practical remarks:
==================

- I was not using quick launch toolbar because it was taking too much space. 
Now, I can put an icon for every single application I use, launch them with 
only one click, without fearing to have too less space for the taskbar. Very 
efficient. I do not use the KMenu anymore, not the Alt+F2 thingy!

- Same for the taskbar entries. I always closed applications to make space. 
Now I can keep as many application running as I wish.

- Simililarily, I always minimised applications to systray. Not that much now. 
Systray icons are not a long row of icons anymore. They are a few rows of 4 
icons. More compact.

- I finally can display the date alongside the clock! I was previously using a 
22px-height Kicker and even by using a small (and still readable) font size 
for the hour, Kicker inexplicably wanted to put the date on the right, 
wasting a lot of space. Now it's possible to put the date below the clock.

The future:
===========

- The music cover is only a mockup for now. I will code it soon. I always play 
music in the background while surfing, chatting, and even working. So I quite 
never see the covers, and the stars are very hardly settable. I cannot see 
what is the staring I affected to the currently playing song, and change it 
requieres to open the Amarok window. With so much space now available, there 
is the oportunity to realise that cover-pixmap + clickable-stars applet. 
Music covers will start to be useful. And I will rate my music more often, 
more regularily.

Why do I say that here?
=======================

I do not think it is a suitable default for KDE 4. Hum... why not... What do 
you think of that?
Anyway, some months ago someone pointed out how kicker on top was efficient 
for notebook users to have less stiff neck. I was relunctant to use it on top 
at first, but it turned to be pleasant.
So I would want to share my experience with kicker on right, especialy for 
16/9 displays!

And more importantly, there are some drawbacks I would want to be solved for 
Kicker-on-right to be a real option for everybody:

- Some applets are not designed for vertical panel. On my previous computer I 
was having a graph for CPU, another for memory, another for disk, another for 
SWAP, and a last one for network activity. Putting the KSysGuard applet on 
Kicker-on-right... put the 5 graphs one on top of each other! Yes, they are 
layouted vertically, taking more than 50% of the whole Kicker height. 
Unbearable. KSysGuard (and other applets) should be designed to layout the 5 
graphs horizontaly.

- The height of a taskbar button is too small. The button is ridiculously 
little and harder to click. Should take 4 pixels more height, or be 
configurable.

- I hope KDE 4 Plasma theme engine will allow semi-transparent background 
pixmaps, like the one I faked on that screenshot.