Review request: Container plasma applet

[Riccardo Iaconelli]

On Thursday 24 September 2009 19:22:57 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> how is this any different other than the SVG being pre-rendered vs rendered
>  at  runtime? how would we provide for nice sizing? and how would the
>  animations that exist currently be implemented, such as the power
>  indicator zoom in? theme appropriateness?

Well, the pre-rendered png has pixel perfectionness and a number of other 
retouches. Just for the most evident detail, if you look at the real pngs you 
can see that the battery bg of the rendered svg is much more blurry than 
what's intented to be.[1] then you have right effects applied like icon 
colorizing (try to make all your icons pink and you'll know what i mean) which 
nowadays breaks for the "standard" panel just for the battery. current 
animation is also somewhat... not very professional, at least in my humble 
opinion, i think that fading in and out the flashlight would look just so much 
better. and i don't think it's a showstopper anyways.
theme appropriateness then isn't really a problem too, no other icon on the 
panel infact respects it, and i think they do the right thing here. infact i 
think it's a bad idea to make the theme able to change these icons, after all 
to the user they're all "system" icons, icons like systray icons, or the menu 
or the device notifier. as such we have two possibilities:

a) make the plasma theme theme all the icons, including systray and menu
b) leave that up to the icon theme

a is not really feasible though, not only because we give a lot more images to 
do to theme creator, but then we lose the ability to do cool effects (blur) 
because of the crappy svg renderer. even if we do embed pngs, we loose the 
ability of having multiple sizes pngs, discarding all the work done on small 
size icons. that only leaves b as an option.

to conclude, because of the svg it behaves differently from all other "default 
panel buttons", looks worse, and in the end it only gives a sense of 
inconsistency to the user. that's why i feel it should be a kicon.

> isn't the problem really that it doesn't draw the SVG with proper sizes
>  all  the time? i think the painting of the widget could be re-written with
>  today's Plasma and Qt stuff much cleaner and resolve the outstanding
>  issues.

As I explained above, it's really not that. :-) It's borders, grid alignment, 
and other style issues.

Bye,
-Riccardo

[1] i kind of remember there has an attempt to make a power manager in 
kubuntu, with 4.1 i think, they used the systray with the correct icons, and 
you could really see how much better it looked.