Panel layout in Xfce 4.8 (was Re: Goal: Make XFCE rock in Fedora)

[Martin Sourada]

On Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:04:39 +0100 
Christoph Wickert wrote:
> I don't think we can ship these tweaks because they are in the panel's
> rc files while we can only modify the default.xml file. Means we can
> decide what plugins to use but not necessarily their configuration.
> 
> Another reason to go with the default config is the fact that time and
> date formats differ a lot based on the user's locale. We should just
> on the plugin using proper defaults from the system.
> 
Fair point. Then we basically have two options, both of which are IMHO
suboptimal. 
 * Place the datetime applet twice -- one for date, one for
time, because it does not offer sensible layout to display both
 * Show only time and leave the date for tooltip.

I'm not sure about system defaults, is there some setting that is meant
to display the date in the shortened (human readable) format with names
instead of numbers (like Wed, Mar 09 for English locale) or are we
stuck with '2011-03-09'-like. In orage applet I just used '%a, %h %d'
but this should just use translations, not change the layout...

In the long term we should, IMHO, however aim at cleaning up the
time&date applets so that we have one that works properly and not three
each of each is suboptimal in a different way.

> > >       * mixer 
> > Don't we have volume control (pulseaudio) in systemtray already? 
> 
> this is gnome-sound-applet and we want to get rid of it for several
> reasons:
>       * it lacks the icon (bug 678696)
>       * it's GTK+3 and we don't have a fitting theme
>       * it's not supposed to be in the spin, in the latest nightly
> it's no longer their because dependencies on the GNOME side have
>         changed.
> 
> > Either
> > way, since sound in fedora is best handled by pulseaudio, whatever
> > mixer applet we have, it needs to be able to work with pa nicely,
> > not just show master control for it...
> 
> I think xfce4-mixer-plugin is ok for the panel where you only do
> Master channel. The command to launch the mixer on click can be
> configured, so we can even call pavucontrol from xfce4-mixer-plugin.
> 
Then +1 for xfce4-mixer-plugin that launches pavucontrol on click.

> > > SHOULD have plugins
> > >       * some launchers: browser, filemanager, terminal, mail
> > > client
> > +1, maybe add music player and instant messaging to the lot
> 
> These are problematic because we are configuring xfce4-panel not only
> for the spin but the package itself. We cannot be sure if pidgin or
> quodlibet are always installed. The launchers for browser, mail
> client, filemanager and terminal on the other hand call exo-open,
> which is always there and will open the apps set in
> exo-preferred-applications.
> 
Fair point.

> > >       * folder menu
> > Maybe too complex, does not integrate with bookmarks. Does not
> > include mounted volumes. There does not seem to be a way to show
> > text instead of/alongside the folder icon. I believe Places would
> > work better.
> 
> Ok, but ATM places unfortunately doesn't handle removable media
> correctly either (bug 678432).
> 
I haven't encountered problems with that yet, plus the referenced bug
is about metacity...

> > Remove frames all the applets. It looks soo oldish.
> 
> Not sure if we can do it. We'd have to patch all plugins because we
> cannot provide the configuration for them and new plugins should also
> be borderless by default.
> 
So the proper solution is to patch them upstream. As the new plugins
are borderless by default I think it makes sence to patch the old as
well in order to maintain consistency.

> >  Use start-here
> > (themed) icon for applications menu, that's what they're people used
> > from gnome and kde and maybe change the label (I don't recall from
> > the top of my head what was there, but I changed it to
> > Applications) to better suggest what it does.
> 
> Good point, we had this in 4.6 and need to bring it back but I think
> it requires a change in the fedora-logos package (because the icon we
> use is in there and must be for legal reasons).
> 
The menu supports loading the icon from icon theme, so if we use fedora
icon theme and set menu to use start-icon, it should pick it up
correctly.

> > Consider weather applet, I don't have usability studies regarding
> > that, but most people I know use something like that. Would be nice
> > if the location could be synced with timezone like in gnome but
> > that's a harder goal. The way it is now it wouldn't probably work
> > out of box so maybe fix this issue first and then consider adding
> > it.
> 
> xfce4-weather-plugin uses the IP address to determine the location of
> the user. But it doesn't really work 100% reliably and exact of
> course.
> 
Well, it didn't work for me, I had to set the location manually and
I don't see any checkbox there to "[try to] detect location
automagically" :-D

> > Plus, we *could* consider theming the panels a little instead of
> > using just plain color, all the above listed applets seems to work
> > with it nicely. 
> 
> I think this should go into the theme, just as the changes for the
> desktop icons we proposed. The theme should provide styles for them in
> it's gtkrc.
> 
I agree.

Cheers,
Martin
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 490 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/xfce/attachments/20110309/1b8d7258/attachment.bin