Re: [Deskbar] Bling

[Mirco Müller <macslow bangang de>]

Am Donnerstag, den 28.09.2006, 23:36 +0200 schrieb Mikkel Kamstrup
Erlandsen:

> As you will see from my mockups I'm not exactly artistic of nature
> myself (not in this regrad atleast)...

Typical hacker-illness ;)

> One thing is the basic layout and workflow, but there's also
> bling-effects to help give a good feel to the application. I'm thinking
> animations and visible user feedback. In the same spirit as wobbly
> windows. - Not exactly *useful*, but gives a tangible feeling to the
> desktop.

In short terms UI-toolkit-level effects *sigh* :)

> To go a little along this way I introduced "LingeringSelectionWindows"
> at some point in 2.16 (the hit stays behind for a glimpse when you
> select it (like WinXP menu items)).

Yeah, that seems a good path to follow.

> I would love a lot more of this kind of effects in deskbar (and
> gnome/gtk alltogether, but that is a larger quest).

Much larger to be honest.

> I've attached and svg with some rough sketches  of how some bling user
> feedback could be given. It is much centered around hit selection, but
> we should/could do these things in many places...

Ok, I've a better idea now what you're pursuing.

	This will not be simple. The only proper way to do this right now is
writing custom widgets, I believe (mainly because of the user-input that
needs to be handled). I don't know how much work it is under Python, but
in C it's not very enjoyable. I somehow saw this coming... I mean people
wanting to go for UI-toolkit-level effects. Nothing in gtk+ right now
has a proper way of time-varying widget-rendering. Having full SVG 1.2
support in librsvg would be a great help, but that's not yet the case.
Right now I think it would be needed to write a new widget that has the
ability to change it's appearance depending on elapsed time
(outline-effect with the "star"). For the smooth up/down-sliding...
hm... that can be done with just window-moveing a decoration-less
window... rather easy I guess. The sliding-out effect of a selected
item... hm... create an additional window with just the selected item
_exactely_ over the item in the list (sounds hard, because different
themes and font-sizes will not allow any absolute position-values or
just value-"guessing"... and I don't know what entanglements with
different window-managers will be ahead). 

	All in all I've the feeling that's going to some hellish ride with the
current state of gtk+. But then we need to gain experience in those
areas, because one day we want to be able to write something generic to
extend gtk+ with or base it upon, thus general UI-toolkit-level effects
become a piece of cake to write. This of course should even go sofar
that the animations/transitions/effects are themeable themselves so the
folks from the Tango-project can extend the UI-unification reach in that
domain too. Why do I feel myself reminded of
http://macslow.thepimp.net/?p=78 all the time?

Gee, I feel like a preacher now ;)

Best regards...

Mirco "MacSlow" M�
-- 
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