unity-design team mailing list archive

[Georgi Karavasilev <motorslav@xxxxxxxxx>]

The unity panel has several issues that have been existing since 11.04:
  - The panel shadow is not a real proper GL drawn shadow, but rather a
.PNG that is being repeated right below the panel and that causes the
following issues:
    - The higher the value of panel's opacity is, the smaller the panel
shadow is, hence resulting in disappearing completely when the opacity
level is below 0.3500
    - The panel opacity is tied to the file manager drawing the desktop
  - The panel transparency is not completely chameleonic (or custom
coloured if the user has set a custom colour via CCSM), but it rather mixes
the chameleonic colour with the GTK theme set colour (gradient) for the
panel, hence resulting in being next to impossible to make the launcher and
the panel being coloured the same way
  - The panel is not transparent and chameleonic out of the box, but
follows the GTK theming which results in these:
    - Pros: The panel is being consistent with the gtk themed indicator
menus and the appmenu
    - Cons: The panel is inconsistent with the transparent and chameleonic
launcher
  - There are bugs with the using panel transparency under Intel videos
like:
    - When the "panel opacity toggles" is enabled and switching from one
workspace to another not using the Ctrl+Alt+Arrow keys the panel blurring
sometimes gets screwed and leaves the planned with a background blurred a
millisecond or so before the switch to the workspace
    - The panel sometimes go transparent when the Dash is active, even
through there is an maximized window on this workspace
My point is - even if we forget about the bugs for a while, shouldn't the
panel be chameleonic and transparent out of the box(of course with "panel
opacity" toggles enabled so when the user maximases a window everything is
to look consistent) ? Surely that would break the consistency with the GTK
themed indicators and the appmenu , but it also would mean that the panel
will be consistent with the launcher and the chances are people spend more
time on their computers without browsing through the indicator or the
appmenu :)