Option for vertical bars instead of graphs

[Cas]

I have a Nokia N900 which has a cpumem applet that displays vertical bars for current cpu and memory usage in the status bar and I thought it might be really good for the same to be implemeted in this indicator as the vertical bars could take up less space, provides a quicker view of current system usage (i am not that interested in history provided by graph) and could just look really cool!

I have attached a quick mockup I did in gimp to give you an idea of what I mean.

[Michael Hofmann (mh21)]

Hi Cas,

thanks for the mockup. It really looks great! I'll see whether I will find the time to implement this, but it looks really delicious...

Michael

[Cas (calumlind)]

I actually investigated implementing this myself a few months ago but then put on back-burner.

I found another indicator called Syspeek which already has a single vertical cpu bar but the icon is not dynamically generated like your graphs. I ended up borrowing ideas from both your code and the syspeek icon to create the following Python test indicator: https://gist.github.com/cas--/4714136

Although there is no dynamic data in the example code I did have success in integrating into syspeek code and the dynamically generated icons look good. I know that the icons are not the same as in my mockup but I could not get the look and the data precision I was hoping for when testing it so I tried different ideas and found that a modified version of the syspeek icons worked.

One thing I have still not figured out is how to display something like network bandwidth that has a moving range in a vertical graph while still conveying useful information to the user.