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| Link: http://
Downloads: 456
| Submitted: Nov 11 2006
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Description:
I know it is a bit late for a KDE4 brainstorm now. I did this months ago but my hdd crashed, but here goes:
PROBLEM:
The taskbar consumes far too much space! Lots of people, like me, seem to find text descriptions of every application in the Taskbar both annoying and useless. Many developers have "solved" this by letting apps reside in the System tray. That's really stupid and messy. Also, grouping of similar windows is very annoying since you have to click on the group, look up which window you wanted and then click again (that's TWO times!).
SOLUTION:
1. Make the Quicklauncher a little bit smarter. When you launch an application from it (or from anywhere else), the icon in the Quicklauncher GOES AWAY to save space.
2. Strip off all or most of the text descriptions from most applications in the Taskbar, and let them be represented mainly by their icons.
3. The space that is conserved this way can be used for grouping similar windows better. They can be beside each other (horizontally, that is), and be represented by screenshots or stripped names.
4. For some reason, Tray icons are far smarter than Taskbar buttons. Today, the Amarok Tray icon will show you a lot of info about the current track, the KTorrent Tray icon will show info about file transfers et.c. It is obvious that Taskbar activities should do that too!
See "screenshot" 1. Notice that the taskbar is only 24 px high and there's still plenty of room!
I PROPOSE an application in which the user herself can configure which apps should only show icons, which that should show some text - and what text they should show - see "screenshot" 2.
The left column shows apps that will be completely stripped of text and show only their icon. In the column to the right, apps that you do want to show some text is listed, and you can configure what they should show. The text that should be stripped from them are configured in the "Strip" section - the rest of the text will be shown in the Toolbar. \\\"Max chars\\\" is to configure how many charaters are to be shown for every app at the most.
I know that can be a bit tricky for developers, but I also believe that it would be the best way. An easier way could be to make all windows show up like icons in the taskbar, and then expand text in a tooltip-like thing when you hover it with the mouse - or you do only the Max chars thingy. The point is that the Taskbar is very annoying as it is now.
License: GPL
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