Notify applet borders issue

[Marco Martin]

On Sunday 03 August 2008, Dmitry Suzdalev wrote:
> Hi guys!
>
> At the moment I consider Notify applet to be in usable state and I want to
> move it to kdebase (through kdereview) as Aaron suggested once.... But!
>
> There's one issue that I want to solve before doing this.
> As I figured out - it's difficult to catch all people that I want on irc,
> and often they're busy with smth other, so I'll just write to the ML :)
>
> Thing is that with current state of things (that came to applet from
> ruphy's great mockup), bottom border of each notification is painted w/o
> roundish edges. This gives a "stacked" look to the bunch of notifications
> and is generally nice, but it works only in special cases:
>
> 1. Panel is 100% width
> 2. Panel is at bottom
Thinking about that it seems this thing will require a fairly big amount of 
code to make it look right, but i think it could be made to look so good that 
it's worth a try.

for that i have a couple of ideas, i think i'll explain them better with a 
mockup:
http://www.notmart.org/misc/popup_mock.png
"Please excuse the crudity of this model as I didn't have time to build it to 
scale or paint it" i.e. the border elements are all a bit misplaced, 
aaaanyways: this mockup is done thinking about implementability a little bit.

the first way i tought about was the
1) making the popup appear at the bottom of the screen with a gradient to 
transparent (totally black if no composite). the tricky  part would be making 
both the popup and the panel to be over all other windows, but the popup 
behind the panel...
2) if we would go in this route Applet::popupPosition() could be modified to 
attempt to place the popup to not exit from the panel when possible.

3) but i think implementing the former it's really overkill code wise, another 
option is to simply enable the bottom border to the last element, in the 
mockup it has also a comic baloon pointer, that would be nice, but not 
strictly necessary. to implement that (in Dialog and Extender?) it would be 
needed a bit of api to pass the position the pointer must have to point 
exactly at the icon. this could be overkill too, but i would like to at least 
think about it "before it's too late"(tm)

4 and 5) panels at the top of the screen would need to be mostly mirrored, 
they would have only the bottom border. (maybe even the order of events 
should be swapped? hmm)

6) for vertical panels i think there is no way to make the method in 1 and 2 
to look good, so they would have to be mostly identic to 3.

7) the simplest one to implement, one single panel with a spacer line, think 
also that one can look good, but i think should be kept as plan B :P

as a side note: in your screenshot i see the area around rounded borders of 
items that have another notification over them has some glitches, to look 
good they should overlap a bit and be drawn like the way i used here to stack 
the panel over the popup.

just my 0.02€

Cheers,
Marco Martin


> Otherwise it looks not very nice:
> When 1. is not in place, you can see what happens here:
> http://s58.radikal.ru/i162/0808/93/bc2797ab934b.png
>
> When panel is not at bottom things look weird too:
> http://s52.radikal.ru/i138/0808/71/6900ef2a4391.png
>
> I have the only idea on how to fix that - make *each* notification have all
> borders rounded. But this would mean:
>
> - all notifications won't look as a single stack of widgets - they'll look
> independent
> - whole thing won't look like it's united,merged with panel (like it is now
> - because no bottom borders are drawn)
>
> I don't know if these are fatal things or not.
>
> I would be grateful for any input/advice/mockups as i'm kinda stuck on what
> to do with these issues.
>
> Cheers,
> Dmitry.