Systray jobs and notifications

[Rob Scheepmaker]

On Tuesday 07 April 2009 03:20:40 Celeste Lyn Paul wrote:
> On Monday 06 April 2009 09:04:32 pm Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > On Monday 06 April 2009, Celeste Lyn Paul wrote:
> > bonus is that we already have the spinner and we've been using it around
> > kde (plasma, gwenview, dolphin .. i keep seeing it in new places :P)
>
> You mean the circular bubble animated thingy that looks like the Flash
> loader animation?

That the one :)

> Ah hah, this is what I was asking about on IRC. So there are more than just
> job notifications contained in this widget?
>
> If so, that makes "glancing" at the widget more difficult. Besides checking
> to see if there are jobs in progress and how many jobs may be finished, you
> have to do and extra detail check (requiring additional interaction) or
> mental math (if you happen to remember how many files you were downloading)
> to see if those are finished downloads or other types of messages you
> missed.
>
> (If not, then no problem)

Yeah, it contains notifications (both 'normal' and file completed), and jobs, 
so indeed it may not be entirely optimal. However, both the in progress jobs 
and the completed jobs belong to an ExtenderGroup. The thing that might help 
is if it's more clear which item belong to which group. We could have 
different theming for items belonging to a group, but what will probably 
already help enough without further complicating the theming process, is if I 
change the following:

* The group widget is always above widgets that belong to it.
* items belonging to a group don't draw their borders (as if their Appearance 
is set to NoBorders)
* maybe even set slightly bigger margins around the items belonging to a 
group.

In this scenario, if there are 2 running jobs, 3 completed jobs, and 1 kopete 
notification, and every group is expanded, there would still only be 2 
horizontal borders (one between the kopete notification and the completed jobs 
group, and one between the completed jobs group and the running jobs group.
Opinions?

Regards,
Rob