Monday, August 27, 2012

Taskbar Icons Fix

When the new taskbar applet landed in ede-panel, application icons were fetched in pretty standard way: inspect _NET_WM_ICON hint and decode image data, if application set it.

However, I overlooked one major feature of mentioned _NET_WM_ICON: this hint can support multiple icons (by different sizes), and modern GUI applications are starting to use it extensively. I added support for this in one of recent commits.

What are benefits of this? First of all, take a look at the provided picture:

application native icon

The first image is natural sized (16x16) provided by application and the second one is explicitly scaled, which was done until now. So beside cleaner icon look, we saved a couple of CPU cycles that would be wasted for unneeded scaling.

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