Announce: Xfce 4.4.0 released

[Brian J. Tarricone]

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Bo Thide' wrote:
> In your e-mail of Mon Jan 22 21:34:26 2007 you wrote:
>> Bo Thide' wrote:
>>> Yes, I have.  I removed the top panel (don't like the idea of wasting
>>> space on two panels), and used panel settings to make the bottom as much
>>> CDE-like as I could.  Still, I was not satisfied.
>>> For instance, I
>>> cannot get the names of the workspaces displayed in the Pager of the
>>> panel (this CDE-like feature was possible in earlier releases of xfce).
>>
>> We used to have an old pager like this as you note, but it was never
>> ported to the new panel.  That's something that's relatively easy that
>> someone who is looking to get involved with Xfce development might want
>> to try.
> 
> OK.  For the way we work around here, it's pretty useless to have
> different workspaces if you are not able to label them in an
> efficient, direct and space saving way.

Then port the old pager to the new panel, or find/pay someone to do it
for you.  It's in the 4.2 branch of xfce4-panel in SVN
(http://svn.xfce.org/svn/xfce/xfce4-panel/branches/xfce_4_2/).  The
reason it hasn't been done yet is just lack of time and lack of interest
by someone with the skills to do so.

I also fail to see how large text labels count as "space saving," but
that's another issue.

>>> There are no "popup arrowheads" as in CDE.
>> Sure there are.  Just open the settings for a launcher, and add more
>> items to the list on the left.  With > 1 item, it'll create the popup.
> 
> I stand corrected.  But the arrowheads seem to be placed on the side
> rather an above the icons.  This expands the panel sideways and thus
> consumes extra screen real estate, something that I want to avoid. It
> also causes ambiguity as to which icon it belongs.  I will investigate
> further.

Wow, aren't we ridiculously picky?  Honestly, I'm getting a bit tired of
the pixel-counting phenomenon.  If you're really that hard-up for screen
real-estate, buy monitors that support higher resolutions.  The arrows
are going to consume screen real-estate regardless of where they are.
They'll either expand the panel horizontally (as they do now) or vertically.

Considering how a bottom-center panel effectively uses all the space on
the bottom of the screen, regardless of how wide it is (it's difficult
to really make use of the areas to the right and left), I'd rather have
a slightly shorter panel (i.e., no arrows sticking out of the
top/bottom) that's slightly wider (arrows on the sides of the icons).

But that's just me.

>>>  And the icons are no longer
>>> CDE-like as they used to be.
>>
>> That's up to you to configure.  Find an icon theme on the web that looks
>> CDEish, or create your own based on icons from xfce3 (or wherever).  You
>> can select the icon theme from the User Interface Settings panel.
> 
> The icons in Motif/CDE are very pleasing (they were designed by
> perception psychology experts at MIT and professional graphical
> designers in industry and won awards for their design when they were
> introduced) and do not give as "childish" and unsophisticated
> an impression as most Linux/Xfce icons do.  I will try to get the CDE
> ones.

Personally I find the CDE icons to be pretty ugly, but I guess that's
just a matter of aesthetics.

>>>  And the colour scheme is too Windows-ish
>>> to my liking.
>> Then find a gtk2 theme that has a CDE or motif look and feel.  Google is
>> your friend, as are xfce-look.org and art.gnome.org.
> 
> I have done that and not quite got it right.  By the way, I have not
> found a way of choosing from a large number of well balanced colour
> mixes for xfce as one can do for Motif/CDE.

I believe someone else pointed you to a specific theme name that
attempts to emulate the CDE look.  I don't know what you mean by
choosing from color mixes; gtk doesn't support a notion of color
schemes.  If you want a new color scheme, you need to take an existing
theme (one with a look-and-feel that you like) and modify its colors.

> Am I missing something?

Overall, yes: tact.

>>> And the xfce panel autohide option is confusing and
>>> annoying (I prefer the CDE mechanism).
>>
>> It's been years since I've touched CDE, so I'm not sure what the
>> difference is (I dislike and don't enable autohide anyway, so I likely
>> wouldn't have known).
> 
> The CDE panel does not behave in any special way (as does the xfce
> one).  It just behaves as any other window while in xfce it is either
> always on top or always off screen.

That's not how I remember it.  I seem to remember the CDE panel being
always on top, but I could be mistaken. Either way: it's just something
to get used to.  Change with the times, as it were.  Be flexible.  If
you really can't, you're free to patch the panel sources to suit your
preference.  It shouldn't be too hard.

	-brian

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