New badge styles

[Rico Tzschichholz]

Docky needs nicer and more variants of badges to present numbers, icons and short text.

See mockup...

There are two main positions. First, the top-right corner where a round badge containing a number or an icon symbol could be placed. Second, the bottom center where are two types possible.
A single-slot type where the badge is a bit larger and a two-slot type where these two slots do not consume more than a half or two third of the icon height. The badge-width should be constant at like 90%-95% of icon width.
Both single-slot and two-slot badges consist of an optional icon at the left and a text at the right.
All badge would be slightly transparent and drawn with cairo functions or partly themed with svgs.

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

Get the art nerd to sign off on it.

[David Siegel (djsiegel-deactivatedaccount)]

lol

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

Approved with 1 modifcation:

1. I'd rather have a fully rounded rectangle.

So, tossing it to a code monkey.

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

Can we just re-use the hover/tooltip images?

[Rico Tzschichholz (ricotz)]

@Daniel: if we use half-circles this would reduce the innerspace too much. So I tried some elliptic thing here.

[Alex Launi (alexlauni)]

Using the same rectangles as the hover text will give a sense of uniformity
and add some extra polish, I think that should be highly considered.

--
--Alex Launi

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

I dunno, I think after seeing the way it looks on Transmission in OS X this looks very... meh...

Here's a shot: http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/8624/newbadgeaa2.png

As you can see, even at a small size it's still visible: http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/235/newbadgesmallbf8.png

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

Don't mean to spam with images, but here's another I found at about 48px with a single rectangle: http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/5725/picture2gm9.png

[Daniel Schierbeck (dasch)]

I don't mean to intrude, but I'd like to give my 2 cents worth.

I find many of the current helpers to be too visually intrusive, in
that they are more-or-less permanent, and are a source of constantly
changing information. Both the Deluge and Rhythmbox/Banshee helper
scripts do this. Displaying rapidly changing information (such as a
countdown or transfer speed) distracts from the main purpose of Docky.

I'd much rather see improved tooltips, containing arbitrary widgets.
Then you'd also avoid the problem of cramming too much info into
little space.

Note that I think stuff like the album art and GMail message count
helpers are great; they display transient information rather than
constant (and somewhat meaningless) updates.

I know you probably have your reasons for wanting to include this, I
merely wanted to mention this in fear of possible feature bloat.

Cheers,
Daniel Schierbeck

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 7:18 PM, Daniel Fore <email address hidden> wrote:
> Don't mean to spam with images, but here's another I found at about 48px
> with a single rectangle:
> http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/5725/picture2gm9.png
>
> --
> New badge styles
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/507386
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to Docky.
>

[Alex Launi (alexlauni)]

I agree! Perhaps something like on hover these badges could fade in to give
extra information when requested in a very visually pleasing way, but only
when it's requested rather than the ui becoming very active.

--
-- Alex Launi

[Rico Tzschichholz (ricotz)]

Hiding the centered badge sound like an good idea. So information gets displayed if wanted and not cluttering the dock or distracting the user. But top-right badges indicating message-counts and stuff will be visible anytime.

[Alex Launi (alexlauni)]

Agreed, that was my intent sorry if I didn't communicate it clearly. I
thought we were only discussing the center badges.

--
--Alex Launi

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

oh yea! +1 to fading in on hover. That's smart ;)

@ Daniel,

I agree that there are some things I'd just rather see in the menu. I think that code is being worked on, but I don't know if helpers can take advantage of it yet.

[Daniel Schierbeck (dasch)]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 12:18 AM, Daniel Fore <email address hidden> wrote:
> I agree that there are some things I'd just rather see in the menu. I
> think that code is being worked on, but I don't know if helpers can take
> advantage of it yet.

One idea I had was to make the "tooltips" more like the right-click
menus, sans the interaction. So the Banshee tooltip would show e.g.
the album art, track title and artist name, and when the Banshee dock
item is right-click, the tooltip morphs into the context menu, with
interaction and all.

Cheers,
Daniel