I hastily suggested this previously in polishing thread, but it appears to have gone unnoticed. My suggestion is the following: icons in panel tray should not be as large as the icons for application launchers are. They should be smaller. This would give benefit of more horizontal space and better visual separation between primary and secondary actuators of user interface. They would become more meek and would help user focus on primary tasks.

This is what it looks like now:
http://a.pomf.se/kxzmdm.png

This is what a difference reduction of only three pixels makes (height from 19px to 16px, same as clock text):
http://a.pomf.se/ukioxy.png

To make it clearer, this is screenshot from GIMP to highlight how much space is liberated after that scaling operation:
http://a.pomf.se/jjjwuc.png

I also made the Kickoff icon bigger than others in the second picture for heck of it by removing all padding, giving it more visual distinguish from mere launchers. That's another idea.

Though this will be a forum lurker's first post, I second that the tray icons should be smaller. Furthermore, I believe lowering the font size of the clock time would look nice as well. Regardless, in addition to reducing their size, adding a small amount of extra padding between each item could do wonders.

A definite yes to both from me!

Aev wrote:Though this will be a forum lurker's first post, I second that the tray icons should be smaller. Furthermore, I believe lowering the font size of the clock time would look nice as well. Regardless, in addition to reducing their size, adding a small amount of extra padding between each item could do wonders.

Adding more padding there would defeat the purpose of liberating more horizontal space.

You're absolutely correct, but adding padding would create a cleaner feel. In the following image (a rough imperfect job), I've sacrificed size further to almost match the amount of space you've created in your images.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ymzv7yemxl67f ... dified.png

In my opinion, it fits with the goal of "Use appropriate size and spacing to create breathing room." (http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usabil ... esentation). Unless you feel the size isn't adequate?

PS: In my opinion, the kickstart icon can also use some changing, but that's a topic for another thread.

Aev wrote:PS: In my opinion, the kickstart icon can also use some changing, but that's a topic for another thread.

Feel free to go ahead and start a thread, I'm pretty sure you're not the only one interested in discussing this

I agree totally that the system tray icons look oversized & could do with shrinking a little, the mockup in the first post with the system tray icons at 16px square looks perfect to me - when you first look at it you think 'that's how it is already isn't it?' until you look at the current ones (19px) and they look much to big!

I also agree that the kickoff icon is way to small as it currently is, I'm not keen on just making it bigger, that leaves very little padding around it & it looks a bit cramped. It's difficult, if you want a big kickoff icon with plenty of padding then you need to increase the height of the whole taskbar which wouldn't be good. What about having a kickoff icon (and taskbar height) that's the size it is now but have the kickoff icon grow upwards and to the right by a few pixels when the mouse goes near it to give a big clickable area (so the kickoff icon ends up sticking up above the top of the taskbar when the mouse goes near it but the taskbar itself stays the same height, just the kickoff icon gets bigger)?

I started wondering is it even possible to make those tray icons smaller (and the Kickoff icon maybe larger)? Now that I looked closer at Neon5, it appears that all elements on panel are of exact same size. Is that some kind of technical restriction from Plasma that forces all panel elements to be of same size? Could some developer comment on that? I'd be happy to hack this over the weekend but if it can not be fixed I'm not going to bother obviously. Just take a look again at how much space that tray wastes: http://i.imgur.com/9CmrKq0.jpg makes me sad.

Here's an idea: Play around with and post some mockups for how you think the status and notification area could or should look! Feel free to think outside the box and be creative. Rather than just think of it as the systray (which constrains the design to pretty much one solution), consider what this function this area provides: status and notifications.

Who knows, if we come up with something interesting it might catch the eye of the Plasma developers who, it must be said, have been freaking fantastic at engaging with the design community here.

Just take a look again at how much space that tray wastes: http://i.imgur.com/9CmrKq0.jpg makes me sad.

There's a margin on top for the blue bar that appears when you expand something.
Hence not looking centred as well as as "wasting space".

@David, maybe we should use the vertical space the blue line takes and put it below as a marging, arguing that breathing space?

Okay! Here are some mockups to really drive my point through. I played with latest Neon5. For educational purposes, I moved application shortcuts and Kickoff right next to tray. As you can see, especially the new monochrome shortcut icons (terminal & file manager) are indistinguishable from also monochrome tray icons.

This image should show most clearly what I'm trying to achieve. The different colour highlightings are there to distinguish between different elements. First we have current situation, next let's highlight it, then shrink tray icons (this time from selection 22px to 16px) and finally remove the redundant up-arrow. The last two are again showing the reduction in horizontal space.



This is what happens currently when user clicks not so accurately in tray area. Perfect in combination with smaller icons! It also makes the up-arrow which provides same view redundant.



I'd also argue against using monochrome icons similar to tray area icons as shortcuts for applications or indicators in task manager. The new Breeze icon set is nice enough and I got confused for a moment there when drag&dropping Dolphin and Konsole to panel and their icon suddenly changed: "they became trayified, huh?!" was my first thought.

"It was not possible to determine the dimensions of the image". thanks forum software! Would have put directly here otherwise.

Chiming in again on this. Has there been any comments if this is possible? I could hack on this myself like I said, but if devs have made it impossible by design then why even bother.

I love where this is going. I think it could add some guides. If you turn them on on Inkscape it would give you a great idea of how far and spaced items could be. I also noticed that the icons on the sys tray are thicker than some of the ones on the taskbar. Maybe a good idea would be to slim those down a bit to feel a little more integrated or on the same league as the taskbar icons. Just to preserve continuity and consistency.

daedaluz wrote:I hastily suggested this previously in polishing thread, but it appears to have gone unnoticed. My suggestion is the following: icons in panel tray should not be as large as the icons for application launchers are. They should be smaller. This would give benefit of more horizontal space and better visual separation between primary and secondary actuators of user interface. They would become more meek and would help user focus on primary tasks.

Like this thread I contributed to back in March 2014?
viewtopic.php?f=285&t=120158&p=318460#p318460

Things really don't look that brilliant at present - especially for low DPI screens with a Vertical Panel. I've been wanting 16x16 icons (or scalable rows) for the KDE System Tray for about 8 years! By the time this issue is fixed I'll probably have a full HD laptop screen!



Robert