GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 661506
Improve fade effect when scrolling
Last modified: 2012-11-29 21:27:11 UTC
The current fade effect in the applications / empathy / etc.. scrolling is not that good looking. At scroll position 0 the fade is turned off and at >0 the fade is suddenly turned on. Why isn't the fade all smooth? The fade could be made sharper and not as thick and the icons / content could be moved down / up by the height of the fade. This way it would all look smooth and not that abrupt when scrolling. You will "lose" the height of the fade * 2 from the content area but hey, it's a scroller so just scroll a little more if there is screen space problems. If the fade thickness gets reduced to like 32 px or whatever it's not that much of a problem. 16 px fade could also work.
Thank you for the bug report. I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you are suggesting. It seems you want us to change the use of transparency in the application picker, but I don't understand what you mean by making it 'smooth'. Please provide further details.
An example: Activities -> Applications -> grab the scrollbar -> watch the upper row of icons as you keep scrolling up and down. The fade effect is turned on, then off, then on. It's all very jerky and sudden because the fade is actually placed On the icons, not above them. Consider "not scrolling" to be "scroll position 0" and scrolling by 30 pixels to be "scroll position 30". If you keep scrolling from position 0 to position 10 (or whatever) then back to position 0 again and keep doing that you will see the fade effect being turned on, off, on, etc.. I's very jerky because the fade in on the icons not above. (reverse for the bottom ofc..)
the fade is on the icons*
Created attachment 201702 [details] Smooth fade
Currently the fade gradient is turned off att position 0 and turned on at position >0. It should be on all the time but placed above and below the icons / content to provide a smooth fade in/out of the content when scrolling.
Google Play on Android has one nice solution to this problem. The app picker has a gradient (or as you have implemented it, a fragment shader). This gradient is turned off when the scroll bar in the app picker is at the top. If you scroll down just one pixel you will see the gradient switch on kind of 'flickery'. Google Play also has a gradient (look closely to the bottom of the main page). Scroll down all the way and scroll up a bit. Look at the gradient. They smoothly slide away the gradient when approaching the bottom. This way it doesn't look choppy like in GNOME. If you don't get my custom made English I can post a video.
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but we are happy to tell you that the problem has already been fixed. It should be solved in the next software version. You may want to check for a software upgrade. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 689249 ***