New panel framework

[Nicolas Masse]

A panel working as a sidebar you said? Well, I think it will be possible with the coming panel. From my point of view, if you want a panel on the side, then it is to the plugins to change their layout accordanatly. But the panel itself can stay as he is (or I miss something?). I also tried the program you spoke about (on my brother's computer lol). From an implementation point of view, all I see can be implemented as panel plugins. The only thing this program has is his ability to hide some of the application running in it, so if we want that, just an ability for the panel to hide some of his plugins(or reduce them on a labeled button). Adding this possibility could be nice, but since the panel is already being rewritten, this can be a good idea for the 4.6 version. (Also I dont see any incompatibilty with the current panel, correct me if I'm wrong).
And also you said that no panel does this correctly, possible but I think I already found something like this being an idea for gnome panel's future. (can't find the page where I saw this).
But again, I think lots of this is just a layout problem, and the plugin themself have a lot of responsabilities then.

Just my opinion ;-),
Masse Nicolas.

On Fri, 02 Sep 2005 20:44:35 +1000
Jeff Franks <jcfranks at tpg.com.au> wrote:

> Jasper,
> 
> The panel source and plugin code is well laid out and easy to follow. 
> Excellent work!
> 
> I have had an idea for sometime I thought I might mention. I have always 
> found the vertical layout on some desktop panels awful (e.g. KDE's 
> kicker). The task bar entry text gets chopped off, and the clock and 
> some icons tend to look squashed. When you enlarge the panel to try to 
> overcome this the icons don't enlarge but the pager and task bar do, so 
> much so that you end up with a panel much longer than the vertical 
> height of the screen which is only accessible by using up and down 
> arrows. Not really user friendly or visually appealling.
> 
> Some time ago I came across this freeware application for Windows 
> (http://www.desktopsidebar.com/) which is a desktop sidebar based on the 
> Longhorn sidebar. I found it well laid out and quite useful. It had 
> small embeddable applications that had a small resizeable application 
> window rather than an icon, something like the old WindowMaker 
> application dock but only larger. The embeded  applications could be 
> minimized to menu item size to preserve space. What I liked about the 
> sidebar was the fact that you could actually have useful applications 
> running in it.
> 
> What I thought could be a good idea is a desktop panel application with 
> different two layouts. One for horiziontal mode (like a regular panel) 
> and one for vertical mode (like a sidebar). No linux panel currently 
> does this and if done well, it would certainly stand out from the other 
> panels. Larger LCD monitors, and especially widescreen ones make 
> different layout demands on the desktop. On a square monitor a panel at 
> the top and/or bottom is a good layout. However on a widescreen monitor 
> the desktop has more horizontal space than vertical and so a vertical 
> layout would be better.
> 
> Had you thought about a sidebar-like layout for the vertical panel mode.
> 
> Just some thoughts,
> Regards,
> Jeff
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