unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ryan Gauger <rtgkid@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Jul 27, 2012, at 12:30 PM, Georgi Karavasilev <motorslav@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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 :)
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I've never found the shadows to be a problem, but maybe that's just me. They do what they are supposed to do, which is give perspective that the top panel is above the rest of the desktop.

---Ryan