Tale of a little pixel

A system tray even more Plasma

In KDE 4.3 there is the beginning of the support of the new systemtray protcol with some applications that supports it already, and as said, we hope to get a good percentage of our apps supporting it for 4.4.

But there will be an even more crazy thing, as seen in this picture.

Plasma widgets can now be embedded into the system tray (here the battery icon), there is no config ui at the moment (soon to come, i think will be possible to put here only a tiny subset of them anyways)

If you have trunk and want to try it right now you can do the following. Open ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletrc, look for the systray entry and if for instance its entry is [Containments][3][Applets][63] add a new entry that looks like:

[Containments][3][Applets][63][Configuration][Applets][137]
geometry=24,2,22,22
immutability=1
plugin=battery
zvalue=0

Oh, and by the way: I'm going to gcds

When will tray icons every become bigger?

My big qualm with the system tray in 4.x is that the icons are very small, no matter how much I make the taskbar high, tehy stay the same size.

I install KDE4 based distros for family members and anyone over 60 has one thing they all want: BIGGER! Everything bigger.

When eyesight is a problem, the default fonts, the icons, everything is set to a bigger size but the taskbar icons, the ones they need to click on Kopete, Skype and Amarok are the smallest things they have on the desktop.

I installed another language for someone and they said they could not see the little flag they have to click on to change lanaguages.

I can make EVERYTHING bigger in KDE (to hell with the design queens and the sleekness of 10pt fonts) except the size of the icons in the system tray.

Its the one thing that's been bugging me simply because so many older people have asked me for it.

Sent from terry demonte (Anonimous) on 29/08/2009 at 4:43:13

WHY?

I can see no possible advantage to this at all. In fact, it can only cause user confusion.

What would be useful, perhaps similar to DC's suggestion would be a way to have multiple rows of entities on a Panel.

Sent from James Tyrer (Anonimous) on 11/07/2009 at 21:33:11

Oh thank god!

Sweet jesus! I really want this feature! I agree with everyone else that there is just too much wasted space in the task bar!

~~ Assclown '09 ~~

Sent from Assclown 2009 (Anonimous) on 05/07/2009 at 20:16:44

drag and drop?

Hello. Why do we need a "configure option" for this? Can't we just drag and drop the plasmoid into/from the systray?

Oh. BTW. Very nice work!!!

Sent from nbensa (Anonimous) on 02/07/2009 at 2:40:24

redm

Cool, I always felt the big network manager or power manager icons were wasting space in my panel!! :)

What I wonder, however: why put plasmoids in the systray, and not make them a systray app in the first place?? Are they used differently than as a systray style app? I mean, who needs a huuuuge battery icon on the desktop anyway? Is it the plan to replace systray apps by plasmoids? What am I missing from the big picture? :)

Sent from Why a plasmoid? (Anonimous) on 01/07/2009 at 1:05:14

How about adding a dedicated Plasmoid container?

Although putting the plasmoids in the system tray is nice, how about adding a dedicated plasmoid container? It would be just like the system tray, but would not show the tray icons. This would solve at least five outstanding Plasma bugs. See here:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=193015

Sent from Dotan Cohen (Anonimous) on 01/07/2009 at 0:28:55

Finally

Don't have much to say other than: Finally.

Have been waiting for this since I heard that the system tray supports plasmoids (the notifier icon (i), for example, is technically speaking a plasmoid right?).

@Heller: You'll probably get more help if you post it in the forum: http://forum.kde.org

Don't forget to include information about your graphic card/video driver.

Sent from Hans (Anonimous) on 01/07/2009 at 0:25:25

Black icons

yes, this is not the right place I know, but before I can get the time to digg into bko : is this a know bug that I can't see the systray icons when compositing is off ? The icons are there, I can click on them but they are just black... I use KDE trunk btw

Sent from Heller (Anonimous) on 30/06/2009 at 23:53:43

Delicious

Hi. This is really nice. So i dream about move some icons to tray:

http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/9055/snapshot7i.png

Thank you very much! :)

Sent from Martin (Anonimous) on 30/06/2009 at 23:21:16

great, but...

"Everything must change in order to remain the same"

Sent from Tancredi (Anonimous) on 30/06/2009 at 23:15:01

Extenders style

I really like that. I think the only thing that could be improved would be to show to what icon the extender is related to.

It is the same problem with regular Plasma extenders.

The early mockups of KDE4 had nice ideas for that:

http://kde-look.org/CONTENT/content-pre3/30012-3.jpg

I think the way the red color surrounds the icon and merge into the extender is a nice way to show that.

What do you think ?

Sent from Marc (Anonimous) on 30/06/2009 at 23:08:30

+1

Very cool! I also felt that this was missing, because some widgets (like battery or device notifier) behave very much like tray stuff but cannot be put on the tray.

This should definitely still go in for 4.3!

Sent from ianjo (Anonimous) on 30/06/2009 at 23:02:38

Re: Cool!

@pano: there was a start of this in the systray code since 4.2, it was disabled because it couldn't correctly save and restore the widgets status, i've just kicked it until it worked :p

Sent from Marco Martin (mart) on 30/06/2009 at 22:58:12

Cool!

Cool, this is something I had in my mind a long time ago before I created an topic about this on KDE Brainstorm forum: http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=59456&p=81533

Thanks for implementing it!

(Btw: Did you know about that topic, or did you simply have the same idea? :))

Sent from pano (Anonimous) on 30/06/2009 at 22:50:30