Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Small panel enhacements

With last couple of commits, panel got two small enhancements: variable width and hiding capability.

Setting custom panel width was feature requested long time ago for eworkpanel in EDE 1.x. I'm not sure why but people likes it, although I'm getting feeling something is missing when I'm not having fully stretched panel. But, we should not discuss about personal preferences...

As everybody likes screenshots, here it is:

Panel shot

Check the gallery for full size, as I wasn't able to find sane way to link smaller thumbnails on bigger images.

The background is taken from Desomnis gallery; she kindly allowed me to to use couple of images as wallpapers and distribute them with EDE package. Nice example in murky art world, where IMHO they are quite behind with their licenses (comparing to GPL, BSD, etc.) and do-not-use-until-I-allow-it attitude.

The second enhancement is addition of small button (I called it hider) for explicit panel hiding. I always liked this feature in older KDE/GNOME versions, which sadly gone over the time. Autohide is nice feature (which by the way is not implemented yet), but I find it more annoying than usable: panel is hidden, you accidentally move mouse to the bottom and it pops out, then wait to hide itself again... I like more explicit things: when I hide it, let it stay hidden until I decide to show it.

Hider shot

Again, personal preferences...

Just to note: there are issue when panel width is shrinked and clicked on hider; panel will not be able to be shown any more. This will be hopefully fixed soon.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thumbs up for new improvements. It would be nice styling fix to remove the panel border from bottom, which looks a bit weird.

Sanel Z. said...

Thank you :)

There is no visible border when desktop is run; that is presumably defect from image scaling.