ANNOUNCE: xfdashboard 0.1.906 released

[Simon Steinbeiß]

On Tue, 22 Apr 2014 22:46:37 +0200
Stephan Haller <nomad at froevel.de> wrote:

> Uhh ... What do you mean with "flashy"? If you mean ugly or too much
> presented, then yes, it's true. Sadly I'm not a designer :(

Hey,
I finally checked out xfdashboard after reading that you might need some design advice :)
There are a few things I don't really get about xfdashboard or that could simply be improved. Here goes a preliminary list, based on my first (not very thorough) impression:

 * Why is there a sidebar on the left, when it only always displays one icon on the top? (indicating whether your searching apps or browsing apps) Why not at least show icons of running apps there? Or just drop it? (Frankly, I don't think this indicator is needed.)
 * Don't use the fullscreen-icon for the window-list overview, that's misleading. Either design an icon for this or use something like the scale-plugin icon found in elementary-xfce and ship it with xfdashboard.
 * The blue and red are rather unnecessary highlights. Just use the selected_bg_color of the gtk3 theme to draw both of those focus lines. Also, they're too thick in my opinion. A 1px line is enough for focus.
 * While I like the fact that you use stock icons, please use their symbolic variants so that they get recolored accordingly. Currently, many of the icons aren't properly visible (using dark icons on dark background).
 * The "welcome to xfdashboard" label is unnecessary, if you wanna show that it's loading, show a spinner instead.
 * Since you're already using clutter, can't you add a slide-in animation for the workspace-switcher on the right? That'd feel much more natural to me than the current (slightly clunky) jump-in.
 * It's a bit odd that the window-previews don't have the window-borders included. This is only a minor nuisance, but in fact skippy-xd managed to fix that, so in case you feel like checking that out, that'd be great in my opinion!
 * Shortcuts and all are great to launch xfdashboard, that way it could be bound to a launcher in the panel. You could also ship a tiny panel-plugin though that provides such a launcher (just to make it easier for users).
 * If there's only one running app that has a relatively small window, that makes for an ugly upscaled window in the overview. I'd add a maximum window-size of 100% (of the original window size in the preview) to prevent this oddity.

So as I said, I haven't used it for a long time, these are just the points that meet the eye immediately.
Hope it helps!

Cheers
Simon