Hi,

currently there is a animation effect in Plasma (e.g. kickoff, cashew) menus. When you move the cursor vertically the highlight on the current entry is animated, which means that it will trail the cursor until it catches up with it.

I think this animation makes the system look slow as it appears that it can't keep up with the cursor. It's also different from any other menu in the application which show immediately which entry is selected.

Therefor my suggestion would be to remove that animation effect or at least turn it off by default.

Yes please!

I am kind of annoyed by this too. Not that it's something too terrible, but it still feels like a waste of time to wait this 1/4 of a second till the focus catches up.

Ok even faster reply than the past ones!

Thy will be done Slangkamp!

(ok I just wanted to make you feel like we did it just for you In reality this is gone already because everyone hated it for just the same reasons you mentioned)

<3

Oh nice. I'm not following Plasma 2/Next closely, I just saw the video sebas posted yesterday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5vpv7Hln98 and that still has the animation.

jensreuterberg wrote:Ok even faster reply than the past ones!

Thy will be done Slangkamp!

(ok I just wanted to make you feel like we did it just for you In reality this is gone already because everyone hated it for just the same reasons you mentioned)

<3

Hi Jens,

I am just wondering if the Highlight animation will be made useable in Plasma Next?

The main reason it is currently unusable on a current 4.12.3 (or earlier) KDE Desktop is because the timing is wrong (as has been pointed out on numerous forums). Windows should be highlighted after a short hover delay and disappear immediately the cursor leaves the Taskbar space for that application. This is the default behaviour on Windows 7 with Aero enabled and works well. Currently the KDE timing is **** backwards - the Windows highlights appear immediately the mouse enters a Taskbar entry and then hang around for delay after the mouse cursor has left the Taskbar entry. I gather this behaviour is due to a hardcoded timing value in the current KDE Plasma code.

Thanks
Robert

I totally support this idea. I think design is not only how it looking, it's also how it feels.

Well since everything is a work-in-progress, these things will be done bit-by-bit meaning that everything will be released quickly by the alpha and then worked on as we go along. The highlight thing is a good example of all this BUT it requires that we all pitch in. So try to do a mockup thing of your ideas, don't get too drastical with them and lets hammer it out together. That way instead of having 12 designers we have a few hundred and we can all be a part of Plasma Next.

Specifically: I don't know exactly where we are right now with the hoovers and highlights - I'm on vacation still and I don't want to hassle the devs while on a beach

But it's coming, we're all on the same track about animations and the issues about them but we need to try and test together for them to be fixed.

jensreuterberg wrote:Specifically: I don't know exactly where we are right now with the hoovers and highlights - I'm on vacation still and I don't want to hassle the devs while on a beach

Jens,

On a beach ??!!

IMHO there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the existing Highlight and Window Thumbnail animations - in fact I really like them!!

However both would benefit from a selectable hover delay - rather than the existing "hardcoded" delay in Plasma - or the hover delay should be increased from the effective/perceived 0s it currently is. Also both animations should go away/change immediately when one moves the mouse out of an entry in the Taskbar / Icon Tasks. Like I said before this is the behaviour in MS Windows 7 (a fixed hover delay for activation and then the animation clears immediately one leaves a Superbar entry). I would suggest the Window Thumbnail animation might benefit from a shorter delay than the window Highlighting - if hardcoded hover delay values are still necessary. The Highlight animation is very disruptive to a user's workflow if it is accidentally triggered...

This might seem out of the remit of the Visual Design Group... But I am sure everyone turns off the Highlight animation - because it is so annoying... So somebody needs to push for a change in the next version of Plasma!! It's all HCI stuff after all...

Ah well rant over...

Enjoy your break!!
Robert

The Plasma Next Alpha One still shows the animations, so it's still in there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfyXip_e1ms

slangkamp wrote:The Plasma Next Alpha One still shows the animations, so it's still in there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfyXip_e1ms

I didn't actually see any Windows highlight animations in that video... What time point?

Thanks
Bob

Yes it's still in the Alpha video Sebas made. This is important to remember - I want you guys (everyone) too see and be able to be a part of changing Plasma Next into something awesome. That means that you get to see the back-and-forth and half-done bits.

I recently posted some doodles I drew on a page as an example on the blog and got a mail about "how unprofessional" it was. "I know", I replied, that was the point.

The biggest thing for me is how radically different the workflow with the design for Plasma Next is. It's not the classic hide-reveal game of a sales pitch, it's showing all the roughage, all the bad bits and everything without any shame and without pride knowing that all input is welcome. You will see it all and be part of it all.

So with that: trust me, it will be removed, this is still the Alpha and we got in late in the game - things will still change.

I guess we all forgot or left it to someone else. I
think sebas is the maintainer of the launcher but he's away currently. I'll
make it not lag.

Email correspondence today with David E.

Fixed this morning.
https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/w ... ef320be3b1

Qt's default is to put in a silly animation which means we developers need to manually turn it off every time.
If this comes up anywhere else please tell me.

Wait, it seems like there are two topics in this thread. One is the petition to remove the highlight that you see if you mouse over entries in the context menu, kicker, etc. And the other is tweaking the highlight window animation that you get from the task manager. I'm all for the second one, it really should be fixed as right now it's so annoying I end up disabling it. But which one was removed?

TBH the highlighting thing is something I missed entirely

I dunno. See the issue with animations is that its both a technical and a design issue. Personally I turn it off at first install because I consider it frivolous and more distressing than anything else (with Wobbly windows, Desktop Cube etc etc). I've simply never understood it's reasoning.
But I know that when I forget to turn it off it's essentially a massive flickering going on when you move the cursor over the panel and I can't understand whether that is due to some kind of technical issue that makes it flicker or if that was essentially it and that it's a design issue.

This really ties into another issue that we have going aside from this: "Animations - what are they good for?"

Animation, has been talked about over and over but essentially animations have been treated as fun things and nothing else, redundant glitter. Animations can be extremely valuable to the user experience in that they can tell you things quickly about your desktop that you wouldn't otherwise know (the slide when switching desktop for example which helps to get a spatial awareness - telling you where you are in your many virtual desktops).
Now I am not arguing for removing desktop effects - just putting them all in an opt-in thing like KDE-looks. Instead of adding every effect known to man we simply remove every effect we got going and start over by adding the things that ACTUALLY help the user ignore the desktop (yes "ignore") and then see how we can optimize those things for usage. Cut down animation time, smooth them out as good as possible etc.

By focusing all attention on getting a few animations up-to-snuff we can actually make them usable.