New panel in trunk

[Fabian Nowak]

hi jasper!

i totally dislike the new panel at the moment - though i'm already developping for it.

1. menus on starters
   a. no "remove entry" on rightclicks in menus
   b. no "add new entry" on rightclick on arrow-button
   c. the items in the starter menus are shown in the opposite order of
      the list where you edit them. i suggest adding a separtor line 
      into the menu editor after the first item or to even additinally 
      place it at the bottom.

2. panel settings
   a. configuring the size takes much more time than before,
      i suggest using an editable combobox with 22, 32, 48, 64 pixels or
      even better the old one and an otional entry "specify own size" 
      which would set a spin_box sensitive

3. moving items
   a. should work after rightclick menu option "move item"
   b. ... crashes the panel sometimes
   c. doesn't work with separator items sometimes, it just did ...

4. removing items
   a. popups a dialog which i really did NOT expect, since plugins are 
      so small that even if you accidently removed them, it is not a
      matter of time to re-add them; but it is a matter of time to 
      read this "really remove" dialog when you remove items.

5. adding items
   a. ... should really be possible with a button "add to panel" which 
      puts the item as last element into the panel.
   b. the options dialog does no longer popup when items are added.
      very annoying, 'cause first-time-xfce users will not know that 
      they can for ex. have the pager use two rows.
   c. the panel just crashed after chaging from "terminal" icon to own
      icon.
      actually, it does most of the time when trying this in either  
      starter.
   d. there is no dnd-possibility onto the icon-button in starter dialog
      as it was in 4.2.
   e. without tabbing thru the starter config (due to the icon list in 
      the middle of the order when tabbing thru the fields, i got to 
      mouse click), many options are not kept or used from their entry 
      fields. 
   f. what about a separator line?

6. translations are quite old and should start to become reviewed...
   a. i attached de.po.gz for trunk (moritz already said it was ok to 
      help out)

7. pager
   a. i just found that the pager is disabled because - like in gnome - 
      it is  used in the old taskbar - uh, that's not xfce'ish i think.
   b. adding it made my panel just crash.


the clock and separator are no more transparent after having moved any
item in the panel. reloading the theme makes them transparent again.
i'd also like to change the fontsize of the analog clock display - at
least as far as i allowed in the sensors plugin by having 5 different
sizes.

this reminds me that porting the sensors-plugin won't be fun since i
could rely on exactly 5 well-defined panel sizes to adjust how many
items to put into one row - you can try adding about 4-6 values, it will
adjust according to the panel size, how many labels to display per
column.

where are the icon theme settings??? i got an ugly crystalsvg'ish theme
now :(

where is the default config consisting of menu, terminal, file manager,
browser, multimedia, printer and settings? (and panel, clock, ...)

basically, it think that managing starters and their menus has become
much more complicated and unintuitive.

to sum up, the current trunk panel is the right way to building an
alternative gnome panel, it is not the way to keep power-users nor to
gain newly starting *nix users 'cause they will return to gnome/kde
where they came from as it makes a lot of things much easier.
it was especially the panel, lateron the session-manager which made me
use xfce. knowing how to configure gnome to look like my old
xfce4.0/4.2, this reason is no longer given.

what i really DO like is
- having one panel for taskbar, bottom panel (, iconbox?).
- having those frames around systray - quite good for new users IMO
- and having the option to turn the frame off after having found it ;)
- panel stays at top when settings are up.
- the file-selection window does use the current path when opening

best regards, fabian


PS: Sorry for the message coming so late, it has been a while in the 
mailservers' queue with wrong sender's address.


Am Dienstag, den 27.09.2005, 22:16 +0200 schrieb Jasper Huijsmans:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have just switched SVN trunk to the new panel framework. This is a
big 
> change, so expect some b0rkage. You have been warned.
> 
> The update will probably fail with a message about plugins and panel 
> directories. 'rm -rf panel plugins ; svn up' should do the trick.
> 
> Note that most of the panel plugins have not been ported yet, so they 
> will not work. Also, unfortunately, the panel settings will not be 
> converted to the new panel.
> 
> This is still very much development code, so there will probably be 
> problems. Please let me know about them, here or on bugzilla.
> 
>       Jasper
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