[Panel-devel] kalming kickoff

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday 12 November 2007, Sven Burmeister wrote:
> The only thing that comes to my mind, if changing the colour of an icon is
> not an option is to make it bigger

i tried this. it looked pretty odd. it would really require a lot more 
vertical space, some animation and probably even a parabolic effect (ala the 
mac dock) to look at all decent. =/

i have been through so many permutations of this stuff ... font sizes, faces, 
bold / italic, icon sizes, opacities, highlight rect sizes and opacities, 
etc, etc... 

> Even though it would change the way I work with the menu a bit, I have to
> say that in the end I think that if there is no other option to make the
> icon change state then greying out, I would support the applications-tab
> style. This would cost that the user has to point to the item one wants
> more information about and pay that there is a very clean GUI with not too
> much information at once and a very clear change in all parts of a selected
> item.

yes, that's actually one of the combos not shown in that video is "box behind 
text, activate the icon and show the subtext on hover" .. it seems to work 
really well in practice.

it also just occured to me now that i can apply an opacity to the painter 
itself to make the icons paint semi-transparent... it has essentially the 
same effect as the current lightening with the added bonus that if there is a 
background picture, it will show through the unselected icons ever to 
slightly.

i've also fixed the top margin of the text properly so that the top of the 
text box aligns with the top of the icon but there are 2 pixels between the 
top of the text box and the top of the text. looks much better like that.

i've also made the subtitle text dark vs black and increased the alpha on the 
highlight rect a bit more for better contrast.

additionally, i've fixed up the search bar and contents area to have proper 
alignment as per Wade's observations. tab bar is still messed up, but this is 
a step in the right direction ...

you can see where i'm at now here (846k file):

	http://plasma.kde.org/media/mycomputerpage.avi

(note, btw, that all these screencasts are horizontally stretched due to the 
wonders of screen recording software available for x11)

still no animations of course, but note how things are better aligned, how the 
margin within the highlight rect is proper, how the icons and usage 
bars "jump" slightly in appearance when hovered, the cleanliness of the page 
when nothing is hovered and the presentation of the subtitle text itself.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/panel-devel/attachments/20071112/e20ae931/attachment.pgp