Bugs & Probs with the panel.

[Jens Lautenbacher <jens tellux de>]

Hi,

these are some observations I made while trying to use GNOME's panel.

First of all I want to say that I really like some of it's features
very much. E.g. it's animations look really polished and cute. The
Autohiding is a very nice thing to have (I like my dektop as empty as
possible) and much other stuff. But of course I encountered a lot of
problems, too.

First of all a question: Why is the swalloing of applications disabled 
in the source code by default? And with a comment that says that it
should be like that in shipping versions?

A real bug: When I add programs to the panel, and try to customize
them, these customizations are never read again on startup. By the
way, why isn't it possible to add a "new" application that isn't
already in the main menu hirarchy? Or is it? Shouldn't the images of
the panel button browseable instead of adding the whole path via
keyboard? 

Another "aesthetics" point: I think it would be nice if the buttons of 
programs added to the panel would respond with a sunken in look upon
pressing the mousebutton over them. The same goes for the main menu
button. 

Just some remarks towards some of the applets written so far: (Please,
please, I really don't want to critcize people doing all this work
with me doing nothing so far, so take it as constructive and critcal
remarks and not as flames. I know that much of this stuff is pretty
in flux and the glory details will all come later, so if this (or
better stuff) is planned, just forget about all of this)

CPULoad:  It would be really really cute if it would be possible to
          run it in an xload emulation, that means with tickmarks and
          a load level going up or down.  In the properties dialog, 
          changing by typing in any of the text fields doesn't make
          the "apply" button to "un-grey".

DiskUsage:  Hmm. I don't think that this is so useful if having a
            whole bunch of mounts. I would personally prefer something
            along the following: A nice 3d disk that shows two slices,
            where the whole disk is the wole space on the partition,
            and the slice denotes the amount of used space. A popup
            bound to button3 would let the user select between the
            disks available. Hm. personal taste, I know, but now it
            simply doens't look THAT cute.

Mixer:  I wonder why there's only the overall mixing available... Look 
        at asmixer, this gives master, cd, and pcm. and it looks real
        cute. This would be one of the cases where I really would like 
        to swallow an app into the panel.

Clock:  Oh... asclock... :-) Somebody even wrote a windowmaker dock
	app that has an antialiased analog clock. Again, Swalloing
	would be the winner...

Printer: This is the only applet with text under the icon. I think it
	 would be more consistant and cuter to let tigert make a real
	 nice printer icon as big as all the other ones used...

Clock&Mailcheck: nice to have both functions combined in one
                 applet... but I'm sure the look will not be the last
                 word, after all it's pretty new.



Another question is about the overall consistency of gnome apps. In
quite some of the applications so far I see the use of these ugly
"YES" "NO" buttons... Shouldn't they all be replaced by OK / CANCEL
buttons? I think that almost every question/situation is handled as
good by getting a confirmation via an OK button than via a YES
button... and the formaer looks so much better :-)

OK, that's it by now... hope I didn't step on anybody's toes....

	jtl