Review request: Container plasma applet

[Riccardo Iaconelli]

On Sunday 27 September 2009 23:19:41 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
[...]
> 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.

Don't worry, the svg is just the same as the one of the oxygen icons. :-)
 
> >  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.

Agreed, I think we should do it, but here I was just saying that the current 
animation is not a problem. :-)
 
> >  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.

See my previous answer to marco here. I'd love a monochrome icon too, but 
users *are* going to use 3rd party applications no matter what, with icons on 
which we have no control onto. If we ever manage to split hardware/system 
icons and apps then I'm all for it. :-)

> > 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.

Well, KIcon scales pngs so that's not really a problem. Of course the scaled 
sizes don't look as well as prerendered svgs, but that always gave us good 
enough resutls until now. :-)

>  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.

Hmm... we already have all those icons, I counted 10 because i tend to 
consider the sizes as implicit, but anyways, they aren't going to be shown all 
at once. I think it's reasonably fast to load pngs, and because they're all 
cached, i don't think it's any slower than what it is now with svg caching. 
:-)

> > 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.
[...]
> > 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?

Hm, I'm not really sure, as Marco correctly explains, we can't really fix 
everything there.
It's hard to do small sizes, we have one artist (david miller) who is almost 
completely dedicated to that, if you want to have a look at how much the icons 
do change, look in the small/16x16 directory of the oxygen sources. :-)
 
> To summarize a bit what we have right now:
> - pixel alignment
> - Qt SVG rendering issues

+1

> - bad quality of battery.svg

nah, not battery.svgz, i think we can't get much better than that :-) It's 
oxygen after all! :P

> + animations
> + theming (monochrome / color, at least)
> + 'just one theme file'

+1

Bye,
-Riccardo