Disclaimer: this entry won’t talk about a certain thing happened those days, and I won’t in future entries as well, until there is actually something to talk about.
There is a thing that came to my mind some days ago, when i finally decide to fix a little visual inconsistency that was bugging me since some time.
In the KDE Plasma Workspace 4.7, the clock and keyboard layout indicator will look like this (landed in git earlier this week):
The style of the systemtray is now much more coherent, all thanks to a quite slight change of look in those two little elements, in the specific, text svg-themed themed like the systray icons (that is by the way usable by everybody since it has been placed in the public plasma api)
A thing that will come for 4.7, is a series of many small improvements of many little pain points, may be either a small missing feature, a fix of a little inconsistency, or, in any case something small, easy to contribute that everyone that is eyeingto start to do some patches can find as an easy entry point.
There are already some heroes that have joined and started to review all shipped plasmoids for some points of behavioural consistence. First step, now, thanks to them in 4.7 all plasmoids will have a working “apply” button in their settings dialog.
You can make the diffrence too 😀
Thanks for all your work, the KDE Workspace is getting nicer and nicer 🙂
The difference I would like to make is this:
give all items in the systemtray proper margins and spacings and an alignment of the items. You can see it very good in your screenshot here: visual for time, clipboard, device, keyboard layout, volume have all different upper and lower borders (sure, volume control has different sizes depending on actual volume, still maximum volume has too much height).
Spacing between them is different. And center line is different two, compare device and volume icons, arrow is higher than middle of loudspeaker.
Also true for most plasmoids, they do not really align. Perhaps there could be some style guides which enforce this, either by code or documentation.
Just, I have a lot of things to do. Perhaps someone else can do this difference 😉 Hm, Gnome Panel and OSX already did…
I think the systray of kde needs more padding, it doesnt look good with colored icons like amarok using the full height of the systray.
Thanks for this Marco! This polishing is always very welcome!
Can I ask if this is also implemented for the date in the Digital Clock plasmoid?
I.e. if you check the box in the settings to show the date either below or next to the time, it is completely unstyled therefore I believe in your screenshot it would be black and inconsistent.
yesterday looking at my smartphone I was thinking about this:
why showing things that are not useful?
example:
“i” button: if there is not any notification, it should hide.
usb mount: if there is no usb storage or other stuff plugged, it should hide.
For “hiding” I say totally disappear, not just go in the “triangle” of the hidden icons.
Plasma itself must support hiding of some plasmoids if they are useless in that moment.
A ktorrent plasmoid should become invisible if ktorrent is not started.
What you think of this idea?
I agree with guax, though, that the systray would look even better if the icons had some padding, instead of taking (almost) the full height of the panel.
I disagree.
What’s wrong with icons going into the “triangle of the hidden icons”?
The icons need to be accessible *somewhere*.
Even if there are no USB devices plugged in right now, I might want to right-click the Device Notifier icon to change the Device Notifier settings.
In the case of the Notifications icon, I might also want to re-read previous notifications.
I think hiding icons into the “triangle” is the perfect solution. It makes sure unused icons don’t get in your way, but you can still find them if you need to.
The panel looks better and better.
The “it” icon is too far from the arrow and the other icons. It’s too isolated, and the arrow actually looks like it belongs to the clock.
Sorry if this has been painfully obvious to others but I don’t really see the difference between the current clock I have and the one in your screenshot (I’m on 4.6). What exactly has changed?
This looks great, but somebody could also for 4.7 finally refine and polish some elements of kickoff “start” menu..
Like when you browse deeper through application categories, that ugly, blue back button on left could be redesigned. Or those bottom categories could be monochrome or have option to show only icons or only text etc..