Review request: Container plasma applet

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Sunday 27 September 2009 15:01:42 Riccardo Iaconelli wrote:
> 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]

The problem might be that the battery.svg has not been touched by an artist in two 
years. I've hacked an icon's SVG from loooong ago into the battery.svg theme. I'm bad 
at Inkscape today, and I certainly had any concept of pixel alignment that time. :/ 
This is only part of the issue (bad graphics used), the other part is shortcomings in 
Qt and SVG sizing for smaller pixel sizes.

>  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.

That's a one or two line change.

>  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. 

I don't. I'd *love* to see a monochrome system tray, that's hard to do right now, 
except for the battery plasmoid because it's using plasma's theme support. The 
battery applet supports that currently without any code changes.

> 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

You're still thinking of the system tray as an icon parade. ;-)
Having things like the battery in the system tray as an icon, but I would rather not 
have this limit the rendering of it to just the sizes KIconLoader supports. From a 
theming point of view, themers can currently just grab the battery.svg and change it.

Also, using KIcon would mean that we need 120 different icons (10*2 states, 6 sizes), 
that sounds like an awful lot of disk I/O and clutter to me.

> 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.

What would those changes be?

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

Some of those can really be fixed in the SVG file, can you have a look at that?

To summarize a bit what we have right now:
- pixel alignment
- Qt SVG rendering issues
- bad quality of battery.svg
+ animations
+ theming (monochrome / color, at least)
+ 'just one theme file'
-- 
sebas

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