GTK2 Appearance is a little funny looking

[Michael Merline]

Next to each other GShutdown and GPoweroff are laid out identically, but the gtk2 rendering on Gpoweroff looks a little different (and not in a good way). I'm not sure how to report this other than as a bug, but it's mostly a suggestion to improve usability.

Thanks!

[Philip Peitsch (philip-peitsch)]

Hi!

Thanks for the bug report. Are you able to provide a screenshot showing this difference? I'm interested to know the parts you're specifically having difficulty with (as in the bits that are different & worse).

Bugs are a fine way of posting these kinds of suggestions by the way :)

[Michael Merline (merline)]

I most certainly can!

Attached is a screenshot - maybe it's hard to tell but something in the UI just looks a little akimbo compared to GShutdown. I think the lack of symetry in the way the window is displaying elements is part of it; I'm used to space being distributed equally around the edges of a gtk2 window.

Hope that helps! Feel free to ask for clarification.

[Philip Peitsch (philip-peitsch)]

Ahh. Yes, I see what you are talking about :)... Thanks for adding the picture.

I've actually got a more recent version that is starting to change the UI a bit, which is available on Lucid... I'll build a copy for Karmic and you can try that perhaps. It looks like these screenshots: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Gpoweroff#Screenshots (the empty area down the bottom shows the number of minutes until shutdown... I need a screenshot of that whoops!)

Basically, I think the key point of asymmetry (or akimbo... that is a wonderful word!) is the lack of frames around the date & time selection controls. This pushes the labels much closer to the left hand side, and the padding around the date & time elements becomes asymmetrical, making it "lean" to the right of the window. I'll have a play sometime and see if I can balance up the padding, and that should make it appear normal hopefully. I'll post back here when I have some example screenshots of what I'm doing, so you can see if that looks better in your opinion.

[Philip Peitsch (philip-peitsch)]

I've now centred the main text, and unindented the section headings. Oh... and swapped the Action & Time picking activities around. I found I was always setting the action before the time... it' seemed more natural. Either way, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on the matter.

[Michael Merline (merline)]

I think that order makes a lot of sense. What you want to do first, how you want to do it after.

The look is certainly more balanced now. While I obviously haven't used the version with your edits on my particular comp, I think it looks a lot better, and if there are any points where the look is "unbalanced" I certainly would have to be running Gshutdown to even notice.

[Michael Merline (merline)]

Looking good now!