Long time no blog as usual, so let’s do some Plasma Quickies:
I’ve decided to do some love to two configuration dialogs, the wallpaper one and my loved ultrascary panel configuration “Thing”.
A while ago the configuration dialog had some problems.
The monitor preview looked ugly and deformed on widescreens, but most annoying thing it wasn’t possible to chose the desired cropping or scaling method when in slideshow mode, so you had to chose between a single image or a series of horribly distorted images 🙂
now the thing looks like this:
Desktop activity and theme before the wallpaper section, because wallpaper configuration will be just one aspect, even secondary behind the concept of activity (oh and now there is a textbox t give them a name), explayned way better by aaron.
the monitor preview looks always good, not important what weird ratio your actual monitor has 🙂
All the controls are better aligned conforming the HIG and making less visual noise.
The folder list in the slideshow mode grows and shrinks when adding/removing folders, so there is no more a big white empty spot when it’s empty 🙂
Now, my favourite configuration little monster, the panel configuration:
The size handles have little arrows that should be a bit more intuitive what is the min and what is the max and
now the move and resize actions are buttons with a label, so should be more obvious how to do to move it and change the height, while the less frequent actions (or dangerous as in the case of remove panel) are moved in a submenu, so it gives a less crowded look.
And oh, now there is a config ui for the quite recent panel autohide too 🙂 you can chose between normal panel always visible as is now, autohide or a panel not always on top, that can go under other windows.
It still looks a bit ugly but will be given a way more plasmalove(tm) look in the next days, stay tuned 🙂
Hi!
I think there is a little bug with panel alignment options: when the panel is at the left or right edge of the screen, the menu still says “Left” and “Right”, instead of “Up” and “Down”.
I really like the new desktop configuration window, the last changes (with the addition of the “Containment” option, it looked strange).
Thanks for your good work!
Thanks for making the panel-configuration less uglier and more intuitive. It would be even better, not to show the full-width-configuration-panel at all, but instead make me do the resizing by dragging the edges like resizing windows.
Wow, the plasma panel configuration looks even better now! 🙂 Keep up the good work!
Oops.. I mistakenly entered my name/e-mail instead of title/name, could you please fix this? (before more spam comes in :P)
Looks great but what I can’t understand is why can’t you just use normal dialogs for panel settings, wouldn’t it be much faster to implement(and more consistent)?
I like it. Very nice.
My only comment is that the button labelled “Remove this Panel Activity” is a bit much. I don’t think “Remove this Panel” would be any less accurate, and it’s certainly less likely to cause confusion. Removing this “Panel Activity” could lead one to believe that one was only removing some part or feature of the panel and not the entire panel itself.
I’ve looked at your screenshot several times and once again tried to explain why I find this UI wrong (as much as the previous one).
I think the problem is that we have TWO, 100% width toolbars to control ONE panel.
One 100% width panel is used by 4 arrows, another by 5 buttons. A lot of space wasted and I don’t think it helps user understand it initially.
Could you consider putting the arrows overlaying the panel (and fading out the panel)?
Not sure what should happen with the other config bar but it’s also taking too much space imo.
There is a little but (for me) very importante feature missing. the Maxpect view. Scale and crop has a little problem: it crops 🙂
Thanks for your work!
Thanks for the hard work!
Wallpaper settings GUI is nice!
I’m not very sure i really like the panel controller approach at all. hmm…
I agree with what Zbigniew Braniecki said or even with Felix.
Thanks for working on this. The wallpaper dialog needed some changes. There’s a couple more things about it that I think could be improved:
– Using a group box is the standard way of presenting related options. This is the way it’s done almost everywhere, but this dialog uses labels which makes it look weird (compare to every module in System Settings). I could help with a patch if you’re interested (I’d just need a pointer to where to look at).
– Maybe because of it’s former confusing name (“Centered Maxpect”… is “maxpect” even a word?), but the most useful resizing option from KDE3 is missing. Basically it did what “Scaled” currently does, but without changing the aspect ratio, which is more reasonable choice for pictures and some images (btw, I should be able to help with this too if there’s interest).
Regards
Panel alignment: yeah, will do 🙂
mops: because the idea is that you don’t want to set the number of pixels the panel is tall/wide, no really 🙂
panel options: no the arrows can’t be over the panel, because when the configuration is open you can drag applet around, so nothing can cover them
Diederik: sure
Suggestions:
this way should be the new recomended one, the hig are still not complete on the wiki so it’s still not very clear to me, but other kcm look probably will change in this way as well
this way should be the new recomended one, the hig are still not complete on the wiki so it’s still not very clear to me, but other kcm look probably will change in this way as well
I don’t get the logic behind that. Let me explain, I’m not arguing for a particular look, but for consistency. If this look is to be adopted as the default then fine by me, but what needs to be done for that to happen is to change the Oxygen style so that QGroupBoxes are rendered the way this dialog looks. Expecting every application to accommodate thing so that they look like this is the wrong way to go. BTW, there are already styles that can do this for Qt4 such as QtCurve: http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/QtCurve+(KDE4%2C+KDE3%2C+%26+Gtk2+Theme)?content=40492)
so it’s not like like it can’t be done (it is also how it’s done by GNOME default theme ClearLooks: people.videolan.org/~jb/VLC-gtk/gtkCleanLooks.jpg).