Update on networkmanager plasmoid

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hey all,

After hiding under the rock and hacking on networkmanager, I'd like to give a bit of 
a status update on the plasmoid, and move towards getting better artwork in.

On Friday 06 November 2009 23:48:07 Nuno Pinheiro wrote:
> On Friday, 6 de November de 2009 19:20:54 Andreas Demmer wrote:
> > Nuno Pinheiro:
> > > if i was doing it exclusively for air it would be something like this,
> > >  with  more contrast maybe....
> >
> > 
> > Attached is a side-by-side comparison with an improved version with
> > better contrast. If you like this, I will do the other states to. Thanks
> > to your SVG template it was very easy to do! :-)
> > 
> > Greets,
> > Andreas
> > 
> 
> excelent

I really like them, too. Can I have them in SVN, in all sizes? :)

http://vizzzion.org/tmp/nm-plasmoid-alpha-2.ogv

In the video, you can see the networkmanager plasmoid (not knetworkmanager!) sitting 
in the panel's systray area. the popup shows networkinterfaces on the left, 
checkboxes for dis/enabling networking altogether and dis/enabling wireless. On the 
right, you have two tabs, the Connections tab shows the available connections: when 
the wireless network is plugged in (it's not in the video), it'll show an available 
connection and connect automatically. You can click on those connections, and it will 
pop up connection dialogs as needed.
The plasmoid has become a rather thin UI for the whole networkmanager stack now.

As you can see, I've changed a couple of things according to the results in this 
discussion. Indeed no overlay for connected, as you can see. I've not done the VPN 
overlay yet, but am planning to. (Which icon should be used for this?)

= connecting ... =

For the "connecting" state, I wanted to show the progress somehow. I experimented a 
bit with a progress bar, and now have a ring that completes itself while the 
interface is connecting. The different steps have distinct states, a bit like a 
clock, so you can tell "when it's at 0900, it's waiting for a dhcp lease. After the 
connection succeeds, the ring becomes green and fades out after a couple of seconds.

= painting =

I've also changed the applet so that it will only use sizes predefined by KIconLoader 
(so we don't randomly scale, but can get pristine, pixel-perfect painting of the icon 
pixmaps -- as long as all sizes are there). I've ditched the SVG in favor of using 
KIcon, so we're not bound by Qt's lacking of SVG filters.

= layout problem =

the wireless networks list on the right hand side of the popupapplet actually sits 
inside a scrollwidget. I can't get the scrollbars to show, though, the layout just 
overflows. It would be nice if someone could have a look at this, I've been staring 
at it repeatedly and just can't see what I'm doing wrong there. You can see the 
problem in the screencast when a longer list of wireless networks overflows into the 
manage connections IconWidget. It's basically TabWidget holds two 
ActivatableListWidgets which are ScrollWidgets.

I've updated the networkmanagement/applet/README.txt with a couple of TODO items, if 
you want to help out.

In general, I feel that most things are falling into place now, it's developing 
nicely and that the UI concept works quite well as it's now.

P.S.: if you wonder what the crappy LSD-style blending in the changing labels is, 
that's the radeon graphics driver :/

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

 http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org |  GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 
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