The people have spoken! (or well some of you)

Ok I'll go with Fabians idea and talk to Martin the dev about their idea. We may need to have a chat with him on this and see if we can work around it (I think they just added the OSD icons)

Beware though since he has been working on the OSD thing for a while he may decide to kill us all in a fit of rage

A few thoughts regarding the level of detail:

- OSD icons are probably the largest icons encountered on the desktop. I think we can probably afford a little, if not too much, indulgence to detail. As long as the detail doesn't compete with the primary piece of information we're trying to communicate.

- It might be worth mocking up with a full desktop to provide more context for judging size and detail.

Jens: Yeah, maybe let the Plasma folks handle the progress bar for now and just prep a set of icons that can grossly represent the actual value changes.

Regarding "switching around the wifi/bluetooth", did you mean, put the disable icon behind the wifi/bluetooth icon? If so I think it'll result in much the same problem (several elements for the user to interpret). If we keep the overlay-representation of state, then maybe 1/4 scale "badges" that are set in a corner "cut out" of the primary shape. Just an idea.

As for material, I was mentally working with vellum card stock as the base material and matte ink as the paint medium. (Maybe the ink is printed on or even sprayed on graffiti-style, maybe in layers for effect). Anyway, I imagine this square of vellum card stock sitting on the desktop on top of all other windows. All pretty conventional for OSD though.

Sorry, just one more comment. The eternal conundrum when designing icons to represent the concept of language: Latin alphabet characters in the icon - not universal to all languages.

Just really quick because I planned to take this evening off and its already 19:00 and I wanna watch horror movies and sleep

Ok did a quick screenshot and I'm starting to side with nuno on the reflection thing (although not the detail and the progress bar)



Alake: About bluetooth/wifi my idea was to simply increase the size of the "crossed over" sign and not just remove the Bluetooth but leave at a certain level of opacity.

(Paper things sounds awesome but if I start commenting on it this will take a while for me tomorrow I'll comment more)

Ok so tomorrow night after work for me I will have a hangout with Martin Klapotek/Klapatek (?) and probably Sebas about the OSD's and argue for placing them in the system tray as some kind of discrete popup. He wasn't convinced but said he'd hear us out. So Fabian and Cuan - if you can do quick mockups of your ideas for tomorrow night that would be awesome as it might convince them or at least show them what you mean. Remember that it has to be somewhat concurrent with what we have as a desktop NOW but made so it can be changed into all the awesome ideas we have for the desktop in the future...

Remember that we have a real chance to influence the future idea of the Plasma Desktop so go for it!

And now I'm off to bed/sofa! Maybe food too haven't had lunch yet... oh or breakfast... damnit

Based on the comments so far I threw together a few items to consider.




There aren't any progress bars for only one reason: The visuals for progress bars in Plasma are centrally controlled by the desktop theme (unless the Plasma team decides to implement special progress bar theming handling just for the OSD). Given the short term nature of this particular task, perhaps its worth delivering something sufficiently representative of where the VDG is heading and which, for the moment, requires minimal code changes on the Plasma side. Unless we're completely off in the weeds, perhaps we can narrow our preferences a bit. We can always add refinements in subsequent Plasma releases.

Hope this helps.

That does help allot!
I'll bring it along to the hangout with Martin K (the dev), Marco (from VDG but also he's the system tray dude) and Sebas (who is another Plasma Dev). It will be around 19:00 CET/(GMT+1).

Oh one thing the idea was to have the "Se" in the speech bubble itnerchangeable so that it display the country code of the keyboard layout you use.

Ignore the shifting visuals - focus on the actions... This is my mockup for the OSD's in the system tray idea.

The thing is the icons the mix between mine and yours Alake - the ones you posted above - would work as graphical elements in the popups probably.

I ran a few measurements and numbers with my calibrated eyeball.

Test viewing Distance: 2 feet (60.96cm)
Size to resolve background detail: 5/8 inch (1.59cm)
Size to resolve fine primary icon detail: 7/16 inch (1.11cm)
Size to resolve gross primary icon detail: 5/16 inch (0.793cm)

Normalized for viewing distance:
Size to resolve background detail: 0.026 (size/viewing distance)
Size to resolve fine primary icon detail: 0.018
Size to resolve gross primary icon detail: 0.013

For average preferred viewing distance (http://www.allscan.ca/ergo/vangle.htm) of 30 inches (76.2cm)
Size to resolve background detail: 1.98cm
Size to resolve fine primary icon detail: 1.37cm
Size to resolve gross primary icon detail: 0.99cm

For dpi of 1080p 14 inch laptop: ~160ppi or 63ppcm (I think this is a reasonable present to near-future target)
Minimum size to resolve background detail: 126 pixels (rounded up to nearest even number)
Minimum size to resolve fine primary icon detail: 88 pixels
Minimum size to resolve gross primary icon detail: 64 pixels

If the presentation on screen will be greater than 126 pixels (like say most traditional OSDs) I recommend the full "VDG vision" icons with background and detail (with some of the simplifications suggested on this thread and which are hopefully captured in the latest examples I posted).

If the presentation on screen will be less than 126 pixels (like say panel popups) I recommend discarding the backgrounds and going with simple clear silhouettes (some from my original post, some from Jens' posts with some of the finer details removed).

Hope this helps!

Ok I'll see what they say during the hangout in 10 minutes... Will report back as soon as its over

Ok Fabian (et al) this is the thing:

Due to technical reasons they want to use the typical OSD's for now (large image in the horizontal center, and vertical lower part of the screen). They where pretty sold on the idea since the main goal is that within a year or two things will merge into the system tray/launcher ideal to create a unified feel in the desktop - BUT it was too close to launch to change right now and some issues that needed to be hammered out first.

So we have to construct the icons.

The specs are as follows - it will be in a transparent plasma container - if a user have turned off desktop effects it will be a box with the same color as the panel in the theme. The icon color will be based on text color - BUT we can add further colors to enhance visability and they will in turn be based on other colors in the theme. So we just need to be careful defining the colors we pick.
Hopefully the icon can handle the progress bar instead of letting another instance of Plasma do it (which might break the visual theme) so we should go ahead and do that. Marco will supply us with the exact specs of the SVG file (so different bits are given the correct name) but that will be a later worry so start making things.

Alake: the mix icons, yours and mine where spot on according to them. That said though - we need to get some info from Acidrum on future icon themes and Fabian concerning systray icons before moving too fast into this since they have to work together.

The rest of you - don't be scared to jump in with ideas and opinions (not just Fabian and Acidrum, everyone)

Oh and more thing there was a question about using headphones as a visual for "sound" - personally I gotta say that I believe thats overthinking it but it can be relevant to keep in mind - or not. We need to produce them and thats more relevant than producing them to exact wishes.

Thanks for the download from your meeting.

Colorizing to the Plasma theme text color is another parameter to be aware of. Having done a few colorized plasma themes, we kinda just need to be aware of how the colorization algorithm works so we know how to craft the to-be-colorized elements of the svg. I already took a look at he QtGraphicalEffects.Colorize method, so I'm pretty comfortable with how to handle it. If Marco can deliver the SVG spec soon that'll help reduce any potential rework. The main thing right now is to keep any our-color elements separate from the to-be-colorized elements in the svg (assuming Plasma is applying colorization only to specific elements).

As for using headphone for sound, I rather like it over the staid speaker icon. It communicates a younger and fresher vibe to me. I say take a chance. But no worries if we go with the speaker icon: it has always worked quite well.

I'll start throwing a few things together with the full understanding that they're subject to change based on consistency with any future theme, notification area icons, and others ideas and submissions here. OR if someone just wants to claim a few icons to work on, let me know.

I'll join you tomorrow I got to concentrate on this stupid test tonight (oh tomorrow is Valentines... errrr I mean on saturday or else my husband will starting filing for divorce )