Tale of a little pixel

Subtle moving

another quick micro thing that will be in Plasma for KDE 4.4: until now, the taskbar items appeared and disappeared "magically" and when a task disappeared between other two, every task immediately disappeared from where it was, appearing in the proper place. That is sooo computer behaviour, one of the little things that makes computer to look innatural and scary...

Until now :)

OGG version

This is made really easy by the new Qt 4.6 animations framework, and for now there will be just a little taste of things like that, then with Qt 4.7 this will become almost automagic, since it'll support animated layouts natively

Re: Peter

there already is a spinner animation on the icon of starting tasks, that can be even changed in the Plasma theme

Sent from Marco Martin (mart) on 25/11/2009 at 1:54:34

Peter

Looks nice. For usability it would also be nice to add something like a rotating sandclock for starting (but no visible window yet) applications (like in kde3).

Sent from peter181@web.de (Anonimous) on 23/11/2009 at 10:46:16

Two things

It does look really nice. But two things:

a) In the screencast: Why is the freshly opened dolphin first put onto the right side of the konsole and then switches back to the left of it? This does look fluttery.

b) When switching desktops the animation should be turned off to make desktop switching look faster. Also it is no advantage in this case for a sliding rearrangement.

Sent from arwa (Anonimous) on 22/11/2009 at 12:50:08

Multirow...

Will this still work with multirow? How would that work? If I close the top-left task, would all my tasks move in a "wave"?...

Sent from Phil (Anonimous) on 22/11/2009 at 12:17:37

More than slow enough to be perceptable

It's about 3/4 (or 45/60) of a second. People can typically percieve gross visual movements down to about 1/60'th of a second (ie NTSC television refresh rate). Age tends to lower the detail and distance people perceive more than speed, however even so 3/4 of a second is still 45 times the minimum perceptible. Say a person (of any age) had perception 20 times slower than normal, thats still more than twice the amount needed to perceive an animation of this speed.

Now some people may like the look, aesthetically of a slower animation and that's fine, but claiming that 3/4 of a second would be invisible to people isn't accurate.

Personally I think it looks great as is, but would be fine with it being slowed down, too.

Sent from Bugsbane (Anonimous) on 22/11/2009 at 12:12:12

Interesting

Nice, but way too fast indeed, making it half useless.

Sent from Dread Knight (Anonimous) on 22/11/2009 at 9:43:08

Speed

Please add there right away the option to set the animation speed. Now it looks like it is bugging because it goes so fast. And that would help lots of old people who do not see fast animations by slowing down it. And the speed must be possible set independenly and not by setting all animation speeds to slow-normal-fast from Desktop settings.

We should use animations to help people, not as it's purpose would be more eyecandy with fast animations.

Range from 0ms to 2000ms could be enough. Then older people can notice the animation. They are not people who has fast eyes and hands. They use only the mouse slowly and animation explains them very well what is happening. Too fast animation is as good as nothing others than fast "FPS-player users"

Sent from Fri13 (Anonimous) on 22/11/2009 at 8:43:02

Nice Work!

Im sure kde 4.4 will rock the desktop!

Keep on nice work!

Cheers

Sent from Marco (Anonimous) on 22/11/2009 at 7:36:41

Looks good

Looks good, but usually turn off animations... :)

There is one small bug in taskbar.

When I switch to another virtual desktop and then return to previous one, taskbar items are not sorted as I left them. Sorting is set to Do not sort.

Sent from Stefan (Anonimous) on 22/11/2009 at 7:27:03