Make vertical gnome-panel usable

[Jan Tiedemann]

From http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/1906/:

For those of us with wide screen monitors, it would be great if we could have a panel that works well in the vertical position. We have additional space for a wide vertical panel on the right or left side of our monitor.

There are several bugs/problems when using the panel vertically.

1. Window List is broken and unusable when used vertically. The text stays horizontal without wrapping, making it completely unreadable. In my opinion, the text should just stay vertical like the "Menu Bar" and clock. There is also an odd expansion problem. Vertically the Window List is set to fixed size and won't expand to fit the free space of the panel. See:

2. When aligned on the left, the submenu arrows point the wrong way when navigating menus.

3. Notification Area icons don't scale. Either the notification icons should scale properly to the size of the panel, or they should re-align into a grid. This is true for both vertical and horizontal panel use. Launchers should be able to be set in a grid as well.

[Jan Tiedemann (aeonspire)]

Especially 1. seems to be a very old nuisance: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86382

Ideally one would be able to choose between a common horizontal orientation of the task buttons or a vertical one, where the text is rotated by 90 degrees as happens to the menu button and the clock.

I think at least having the window list expand for the available space (see second part of 1.) should be quite easy to fix and would greatly improve usability for those who want to try a vertical panel.
Maybe you could just include the Netbook Remix feature where the buttons expand to fill the window list.

The User Switcher Applet is also not yet optimized for vertical use.

I will expand this report when i find out more.
Also please excuse any newbie errors - this is me finally trying to help with the development of my favorite OS :)
Thanks a lot already!

[Lightbreeze (nedhoy-gmail)]

These are problems that should certainly be fixed, however they effect a small user population who change the Ubuntu default panel setup. Moreover, these are not "ambient paper cuts" because these are not bugs a user might encounter many times during the day.

[RomanIvanov (ivanov-jr)]

Vertiacal panel works fine in Xubuntu. Why for Ubuntu it is a problem to optimize panel and applet set. Majority of users have wide screens - as result we would rather free vertical space then horizontal.