ANNOUNCE: xfdashboard 0.1.906 released

[Stephan Haller]

Hi Simon,

thanks for your "many points" feedback. I really appreciate it.

Am Freitag, den 25.04.2014, 09:11 +0200 schrieb Simon Steinbeiß:
>  * 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.)
This sidebar is the quicklaunch (bar) as I call it. It's like a panel
where you can place application launchers to have a quick access to
start your favourite applications. On first start of xfdashboard it is
empty except for the button to toggle between windows view and
application browser/search view. You should fill it with your favourites
applications, e.g. web browser, mail client etc., before it really makes
sense.

I have it on my list already also to show also the icons of the current
running apps and mark them with an indicator. But I haven't found a way
how to do it. At the moment it is really hard for me to implement this.

It should be no problem to drop it, e.g. with a new theme not using the
quicklaunch. I haven't tested it because I saw no need for it.

>  * 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.
Good point. Maybe the icon theme I use has an icon that looks good for
me. But a "fullscreen" icon could look very different and is even more
misleading. Note taken ;)

>  * 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.
Everything is theme driven now. I do not use any hard-coded values
anymore (if I did not miss anything). So I cannot use any defined and
named colors of the current GKT+3 theme. I already have thought about
misusing the "at-rules" of CSS to implement theme-depedent functions to
use in xfdashboard theme's CSS files. But I never thought referencing
colors of the current GTK+3 theme. That could be really nice I think,
e.g.  "@gtk_selected_bg_color" as such a reference. Hmm .... looks good
to me but it's just a first thought.

On the other side implementing this "@" functions or constant values
would be major enhancement which it won't do in this stabilization
phase. I has to wait when 0.2.0 is released and the next development
cycle towards 0.4.0 begins.

In the meantime I have to define a color in the default theme.

But I can make the borders smaller ;)

>  * 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).
Point taken. I see now that my theme functions are not as dynamic as
expected :( It is a similar problem to above. I do not expect everybody
using an icon theme having symbolic variants of the stock items. So
either I implement a "@try_files(gtk_stock_symbolic, gtk_stock)" to
provide a fallback and having the problem above.

An other way would be to try symbolic icon first and then fallback to
the normal one by default. This behaviour could be controlled via
"UseSymbolicStockIcons=<always,never,as-fallback>" in file
xfdashboard.theme. Just a quick thought.

>  * The "welcome to xfdashboard" label is unnecessary, if you wanna
> show that it's loading, show a spinner instead.
It's a "left-over" when testing notification. I thought it would be nice
to have a welcome notification ;) But it could be annoying to see it
everytime you start this app in non-daemon mode. In daemon-mode you
would see it only once.

>  * 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.
Effects and animations are on my todo but not for this stable version. 

>  * 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!
I will have a look at skippy-xd. If it is a small change I could
implement it as a configurable option for window actors in theme.

>  * 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.
I really missed this issue. But you are right - upscaling doesn't look
nice and could be confusing. I will add a property to this layout
manager to allow or disallow upscaling.

> 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!
Yes, it did. Thanks :)

Regards,
Stephan