GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 81249
some applets on vertical panel look poor
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
I run across some applets that look really poor on vertical panels. I tried both with a wide one(XX large) and a narrow one(small). Let's start with the really broken stuff: charpicker: This applet wraps after every button, so it doesn't use the width of the panel at all. It really looks crap and it much to high to be usable commandline This applet is much to high too. But still uses a small font. Looks horrible because it has too much empty space. Menubar ok this we'd expect that, didn't we. I don't know if it's worth to work on this. The others are not as severe, but still look odd: wanda/fish It is by default rotated, the fish swimming up, airbubbels to the left. I think the Rotate option should be off. modemlight it does not use the full width on big panels and breaks in two rows. It needs more space than needed battery status On wide vertical panels it looks odd, because the battery is rotated into a vertical position, but it would fit nicely in the horizontal orientation. <nitpick> mount on very thin panel we might want to rotate this applet. </nitpick>
Wouldn't it be better if these were filed individually with each applet? Isn't the issue here the extent to which the individual applets respect and handle gracefully the panel size?
(1) these should be filed individually per applet (2) many of them are already filed, if you look for them. I'd sort of like to preserve this information, but ideally, martin, it would be best if you could refile and turn this into a tracking bug, finding the original reports along the way.
Note that Wanda is now behaving like you want :-) All other requests are about applets from gnome-applets, so I move the bug there.
The mini-commander part of this bug is discussed in bug 144016.
Battery applet sizing issues are discussed in bug 144413 and 136457. Vertical panels are not mentioned though.
Created attachment 29361 [details] [review] patch This patch makes the "charpick" applet spread the characters on multiple rows if the panel is wide/tall enough. The code was already present to do this, but due to a small bug the wrong row number was found. I have also fixed retrieving the panel size (without this, characters buttons would get the wrong size).
Created attachment 29364 [details] [review] patch This (very small) patch makes the "drivemount" applet rotate on vertical panels when the panel becomes small.
Vincent feel free to apply both patches to CVS! Thanks a lot.
Unfortunately I don't have CVS access (I wouldn't mind to though ;-))...
Created attachment 29378 [details] [review] patch for modemlights.c A last small patch for the modemlight applet, that makes it use a single line on large vertical panels and tall horizontal panels. The applet does not "expand" though, it would involve a substantial rewrite of the applet (everything is fixed).
Created attachment 29379 [details] [review] patch for battstat.c Last but not least, here is a patch for the battery status applet, making the applet horizontal on wide vertical panels. I just realized it would be a lot more useful to have a consolidated patch... I'll put one here soon.
Created attachment 29381 [details] [review] the big patch Here is a consolidated patch, regrouping all the modifications from the previous patches, and improving the modemlights, battstat, charpick and drivemount applets.
Patches applied. Thanks a lot Vincent! I only modified the drivemount one since it didnt' get the right behavior for small horizontal panels. Is there anything else needed in this bug or is it closable?
Well it looks like the patches took care of almost all the applet mentioned in the original bug report (the commandline being fixed in bug 144016), with the exception of the Menubar. I would say it should be expected a menubar would look poor on a vertical panel anyway. We could try to modify the widget, but it would break consistency by creating the only modifying menu bar in all the desktop. So I guess this bug can be closed.
I'm closing it; feel free to reopen it if you think something's missing.