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My idea is to make the "Show Hidden Icons" expander look and behave more like a tool-tip.

Why do we need to click to show/hide the hidden icons? and then click again to hide the popup. Also, the popup has weird sizes and shows text that is unneeded in a system tray and doesnt fit well.

So to make it more natural I propose that hidden icons be shown when moving your mouse over the "Show Hidden Icons" button (the arrow in the system tray). And that it be shown in a containment that is the same size as the tool-tips and not including any text. Also, I centered the icons to make them look better. If more than one row of icons was needed, you would move the icons up and fit two rows in the containment with both being centered. I dont see many cases where you would need more than 14 icons hidden in the system tray, but if that was the case you could expand the containment down by one row whenever its needed.

Here are the mockups I made to show what it would look like when you hovered your mouse over the "Show Hidden Icons" button in the system tray.





KDE-Look brainstorm post
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=129367

Bug report wish for "Show hidden icons on hover"
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249184

Bug report wish for "Show only icons in the Show hidden icons containment"
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249185

They specifically added the text for 4.5 because they thought it was better then the 4.4 version which was pretty much like your mockup. I guarantee they are not just going go turn around and remove it again. The idea about having the list appear on hover instead of a tooltip is valid, please modify the the idea to only include this.

TheBlackCat wrote:They specifically added the text for 4.5 because they thought it was better then the 4.4 version which was pretty much like your mockup. I guarantee they are not just going go turn around and remove it again. The idea about having the list appear on hover instead of a tooltip is valid, please modify the the idea to only include this.

Well hopefully I can change their minds, because I completely disagree about having labels for the icons. But please consider this as a general system tray improvement idea then. Because in the open source community what is ever completely certain not to change? Also I dont want my idea to use a tool-tip sized containment or centering the icons to be left out. Here are my arguments on why the "Show hidden icons" should only show icons and not the text labels as well.

I dont see how icons and text both would easily fit inside a tooltip sized containment (as proposed in my mockup), not without expanding size after only hiding 3 or 4 system tray icons in it. Shouldn't not using unnecessary space be a priority? Especially when considering that this system tray could be used in other form factors such as mobile devices and tablets where space is more of an issue.

Also, why would you need labels for icons that are specifically designed to be recognized without them? What changes that makes someone need a label for an icon thats hidden whereas those icons that arent hidden dont need one?

I didn't have any say in the decision. If you wish to debate this then I recommend discussing it on the plasma-devel mailing list.

Me personally, I hate the system tray. I hope that new launcher/taskbar mix being prepared for kde cs 4.6 will make the system tray obsolete.

It won't. The system tray will still be needed for things like volume, power management, bluetooth, and so on.

well, yes, but as far as I understood it will be needed only for system apps, like you've listed.
...
..no?
I wish howerer all system apps would be moved to plasmoids someday.

flying_stranger wrote:Me personally, I hate the system tray. I hope that new launcher/taskbar mix being prepared for kde cs 4.6 will make the system tray obsolete.

could u point me to a link talking about this? i would appreciate it. sounds interesting

Maybe it's just all the bugs surrounding the system tray at the moment (disappearing icons, misalignment in the tray menu), but I think there could be a way to improve it further. A mouseover would be a good start. Another small thing would be to shrink the width, as you can clearly see in your screenshot, the width of the menu compared to the width of the content inside it is quite unproportional.

Moult wrote:Maybe it's just all the bugs surrounding the system tray at the moment (disappearing icons, misalignment in the tray menu), but I think there could be a way to improve it further. A mouseover would be a good start. Another small thing would be to shrink the width, as you can clearly see in your screenshot, the width of the menu compared to the width of the content inside it is quite unproportional.

yeah. I was just thinking it should match the other tooltips size, but I dont really like how it looks either. its just too big. I changed the mockups a little bit to resize based on the number of icons.