[Panel-devel] Kickoff menu items

[Aurélien Gâteau]

Aaron J. Seigo wrote:

> hi...
> 
> On Thursday 29 November 2007, Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
>> - Changed the selection to fill the full width of the view. It looks more
>> like a menu this way and it visually connects the item with its expand
>> arrow on the right if there is any.
> 
> this is problematic for other reasons. we've been through that on this
> list now a few times. short story: clashes with icon colours (tight spaces
> make this suck even more), it doesn't direct the eyes to the meaningful
> content, it really clashes with the status bars on the computer tab.

I don't understand this clash thing. It doesn't seem to cause troubles in
applications to have selected menu items painted the full menu width, even
with icons. But I don't want to restart a discussion if there already has
been one. Can you just point me to the discussion topic?

>> - Icons aren't painted a bit transparent anymore. I thought it looked a
>> bit too washed out. A nicer effect can probably be achieved by
>> highlighting the selected item, the same way it's done in Konqueror and
>> Dolphin.
> 
> except that this isn't konq or dolphin.
>
> so, can we solve these issues in a different way?

Sure it's not. Maybe a comparison with application menus would have been
more relevant. In application menus, icons aren't painted washed out this
way. To me it looks like there's a gamma problem in the bottom left corner
of my monitor :-)

I think the gradient effect I suggested could be improved so that the white
layer is applied over the icon instead of behind it. This could look nice,
but i haven't tested it.
 
>> - I thought the title looked strange when it was vertically aligned on
>> top of the item rect, so I centered it instead, and moved the subtitle on
>> its right (in a crude way, since they use the same font).
> 
> this won't work for long subtexts, which is when they are the most
> important.

I agree. But I still think the current layout look odds, with the big icon
and the text smashed on top. I guess you don't want to have all subtitles
painted all the times to avoid visual clutter. Maybe it could just be paint
in a lighter color than the title?

Aurélien