background in app carousel view does not show background image

[James Hunt]

A swipe from the right edge of the phone towards the center fans out all the apps, showing a carousel-like view.

However, the background is always black, whereas I would have expected the background to be the selected background image.

Black is problematic since if one of the open apps is the camera, and the camera is face-down on a table for example, it will be showing a black image meaning that the camera app is presented as a pure black preview on a black background.

krillin, r117.

[James Hunt (jamesodhunt)]

Seems that the camera issue is not only just when the lens is covered. The live preview feature has gone away, so if the camera is running, the carousel will show an "invisible" black camera app every time.

[Vesa Rautiainen (vesar)]

There is another active bug about this issue: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity8/+bug/1375259. In that bug the proposal is to keep the background color very dark but lighten it a bit from black. Just enough to create enough contrast between the bg and for example black camera viewfinder screen.

We also tried the idea that was proposed in this bug. That is using the background image as a spread background. It ended up looking messy even with our light colored paper background image. Also as the drop shadows pop out much more from possibly light background the fake 3d view (truly 2d with 2d tranformations to fake 3d) with fake drop shadows becomes more problematic.

One example: Imagine light background. Take two items in the middle of the screen in spread. Right most is on top and creates a drop shadow on the left item and also on the background. As the background is quite much farther back than the left item the drop shadow should be different on it (much more spread out) than it is on the left item. But as we have just one drop shadow element per item the drop shadow looks the same for both.

Very dark background color therefore reinforces the 3d feeling and allows us to be more loose with our 2d implementation.

Marking bug as invalid. The biggest issue, black on black, is anyway solved with 1375259.