would it be better to have the plasmoid alnong (paralell) to panel size, than you have more space at thin panels and maybe you can change the size (length).

myrjola wrote:I'm in love with Kver's simple and elegant design. I like the idea of hiding the labels when the size gets smaller. Probably a good point to do this would be when the widest label would be wider than the bar. Another thing to think about would be if the labels should scale or have a fixed font size. The equalizer for the CPU is an interesting idea, but I don't see much use for it.

I like KVers design too; it keeps a lot of the consistency with what was there before yet somehow... better.
I would say label should be a fixed size, making it visible only when there's enough room sounds perfect.

Sorry I never replied; I kept starting new replies right before getting distracted by shiny things.

I thought the circular monitors were too good to give up one, so they're also in this mockup:


The only difference is that each ring is a monitor. I figure it would also be good if they "filled" from the bottom so you could better gauge the usage.

Just as a reminder: Please take dark themes into account and make at least the color palette configurable.

Hi!

Time to show the current progress:






I didn't yet get the new design to work in the panel. There's also some work to do on the padding to get it perfect. Plasmoids follow the themes quite well as you can see from the screenshot with the dark theme. I still have to implement support for the theme's color palette. The color pickers in the settings aren't yet up to anditosan's standards, but I'll probably wait for the Plasma-team to implement the new systemsettings design before I start polishing the color pickers.

Suggestions and corrections are much appreciated.

Kver: your panel designs are great! Very nice that you gave the circles another go. Maybe I'll get around to implement them as well.

andreas_k: I think I'll only make the bars horisontal for vertical panels. In KDE4 the plasmoid had a setting to make the bars horisontal, but I think vertical bars in a horisontal panel works quite well. What do you think?

myrjola wrote:Suggestions and corrections are much appreciated.

Only a minor remark: According the HIG on alignment, labels should be right-aligned.
(@alake: This page is a little bit hidden now behind the layout. I would place it more prominent on the HIG.)

Heiko Tietze wrote:

myrjola wrote:Suggestions and corrections are much appreciated.

Only a minor remark: According the HIG on alignment, labels should be right-aligned.
(@alake: This page is a little bit hidden now behind the layout. I would place it more prominent on the HIG.)

That is also my only idea too. Alignment, but the sensors themselves, love them. Maybe the colors need extra treatment but overall it looks simple enough to me.

What do you think? Luckily I had some time over to implement the circular monitors as well. I'm quite pleased with how they turned out.



Sadly a few pixels got snipped from the bottom of the screenshot, you have to trust me that the plasmoid looks ok in the panel too

I'm sending the plasmoid up for review, but I'm sure I can make some cosmetic corrections before the Plasma 5.1 release.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the discussion. You're an awesome bunch!

myrjola wrote:What do you think? Luckily I had some time over to implement the circular monitors as well. I'm quite pleased with how they turned out.

*image*

Sadly a few pixels got snipped from the bottom of the screenshot, you have to trust me that the plasmoid looks ok in the panel too

I'm sending the plasmoid up for review, but I'm sure I can make some cosmetic corrections before the Plasma 5.1 release.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the discussion. You're an awesome bunch!

Oooh, absolutely wonderful! The circular widgets look stunning as well, especially in their large format; very nicely done. This is the first time I'd say a monitor widget/applet/plugin has looked good in *any* desktop environment.

If I could throw in one suggestion - and I don't know how practical it is - but with the circular plasmoids would it be possible to have the blank area at the top, and the filled areas at the bottom? That way you can get an idea of the overall % used at-a-glance by seeing how 'filled' the widgets are.

Again though, brilliant work - those looks magical.

Yes, the output is nice. But I'm not convinced by the alignment. But that's probably due unclear guidelines. My aesthetically concerns come from the center alignment (or rather justification) at the upper area (check boxes with left-hand caption) that switches to a left-alignment below.
I guess you want to disable the color pickers when a monitor is disabled, i.e. the check box 'CPU monitor' is unchecked. I see two options to solve it: a) a separator between the upper and lower parts (doesn't 'Use theme colors' clashes with the color options below?), and b) a center justification for all check boxes with perhaps a different layout/control for individual color settings.
And we should consider to have the choice whether an output is circular or not for every information separately. I would like to apply the circular widget for memory and the conventional bar plot for CPUs to make both easier to distinguish. And 1 sec for CPU is quite long. So what's about to a hierarchy with kind of monitor on top with all options below? Then the current alignment would be perfect.

Heiko Tietze wrote:Yes, the output is nice. But I'm not convinced by the alignment. But that's probably due unclear guidelines. My aesthetically concerns come from the center alignment (or rather justification) at the upper area (check boxes with left-hand caption) that switches to a left-alignment below.

I agree. The first two checkboxes clearly violate the checkbox alignment HIG ( https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usabi ... Checkboxes ) which clearly does not endorse labels on the left of checkboxes. The only reason why there are still many such form layouts in KDE GUIs is because those were created either before the HIG was written or by people who were not aware of or did not respect the HIG. Plus, there is no difference between the first two checkboxes and the other two which would warrant a different layout.

So, long story short, please put the labels of the first two checkboxes to the right of the checkboxes.

I agree that the Plasmoids themselves look great!

Omg. I'd completely forgotton about this! The circles look fantastic! Can't wait to put this on my desktop!

This was merged today.

Thank you so much everyone for your kind words. Special thanks for Heiko and colomar for pointing out errors in the settings window.

colomar wrote:So, long story short, please put the labels of the first two checkboxes to the right of the checkboxes.

The settings window got merged like this:


So now there's radio buttons to choose the monitor type and the other infringing checkbox got the string "Enabled" on it's right side. This also shows that the color pickers are hidden when "Use theme colors" is checked.

There's some issues left in the plasmoid which sadly aren't going to make it to Plasma 5.1:
- Vertical panel support (make bars horizontal and flip the layout)
- Individual monitors for each CPU
- Single bar monitor is too wide when in panel

Kver wrote:If I could throw in one suggestion - and I don't know how practical it is - but with the circular plasmoids would it be possible to have the blank area at the top, and the filled areas at the bottom? That way you can get an idea of the overall % used at-a-glance by seeing how 'filled' the widgets are.

I'll put this on my tickler list. It's an interesting idea.

Heiko Tietze wrote:And we should consider to have the choice whether an output is circular or not for every information separately. I would like to apply the circular widget for memory and the conventional bar plot for CPUs to make both easier to distinguish. And 1 sec for CPU is quite long. So what's about to a hierarchy with kind of monitor on top with all options below? Then the current alignment would be perfect.

I'll have to think about adding support to assign monitor types separately for each monitor. My main concern is that it complicates this simple plasmoid. It's also possible to have different monitor types by spawning multiple plasmoids. However the issue I listed above about the bar monitor becoming too wide in the panel will makes this approach less than perfect. I'll leave the 1 second interval because it works well for me. If I choose to implement individual monitor type support I'll go with the layout you suggested.

I'm still not completely happy with the visual layout of the form, but yes, now it's HIG compliant, so the rest is for the visual designers to deal with

About the configurability: I agree that this Plasmoid should aim for simplicity. For more fine-grained settings, we have the range of Monitor Plasmoids (CPU Monitor, Memory Status etc.).
We should hook the monitors into the Alternatives system by adding a new X-Plasma-Provides value to the list, maybe org.kde.plasma.systemmonitor ?