application icons are faded and hard to distinguish

[Thomas Novin]

I was forced to stop using AWN because of a bug when I have compositing enabled. I was struck by how hard it was to distinguish between the different applications I had running. I found that many times when switching between apps, it took me many seconds to recognize the right app.

When not using AWN most icons just are grey.

I'm attaching a screenshot of "bottom panel" with AWN and a normal gnome panel.

[David D Lowe (flimm)]

I don't see what the problem is. Are you reporting a bug in AWN or gnome-panel?

[Thomas Novin (thomasn80)]

I realised that Windows has it pretty much the same way but I have never noticed this problem there. I checked and yes, they do it better.

[Thomas Novin (thomasn80)]

Absolutely not AWN but I'm not sure what is responsible. Probably gnome-panel yes?

[Michael Rooney (mrooney)]

Yes, I'll mark as gnome-panel. I see what you mean partially, as the application icons have a sort of "fade" to them which makes it harder to spot them quickly.

However in general once you get used to a something you prefer more such as AWN, it is going to be harder going back. Have you tried enabling compositing in metacity?

[David D Lowe (flimm)]

If you're talking about the fact that the icons are "greyed out" on the "taskbar", they only do that when the windows are minimised. As far as I can tell, this is a feature, not a bug.

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

well... if it helps any: when you have a lot of applications running, the icons start to get reduced to the point of being really difficult to recognise. This would be worth a bug or, perhaps, a wishlist: make the bottom panel vertically expandable as an option. This is, in fact, very much the only thing I liked on Windows.

As for the graying out, yes, it is a feature. It just could have been less light gray, I guess. After a lot of applications, and a lot of minimising, I indeed cannot see the bloody thing.

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

did you try setting the windowlist settings for tasklist to "group if space is limited" ? that should provide the behavior you see on windows ...

[Martin Olsson (mnemo)]

I agree with the bug reported, I've been thinking many times about filing such a bug report myself. While it's also useful to have less emphasize on minimized icons I think the current visualization of minimized icons are just too hard to distinguish because they are too much "faded to gray".

I believe the proper "scientific" way to sort this out is to have a professional UX designer look at it and evaluate different ways of improving the usability of these icons.

[Thomas Novin (thomasn80)]

I think it's important also to note that if us writing on this bug thinks this is an issue, it will surely be a much bigger issue for a user that isn't so used to computers and perhaps a bit less sharp on the eye-sight.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

this needs to be forwarded upstream to bugzilla.gnome.org by someone interested on it , for forwarding intrucctions please have a look to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME ; thanks in advance.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for sending the bug to GNOME

[Martin von Wittich (martin.von.wittich)]

I've posted a patch on the GNOME bugtracker, and I also created a PPA that contains the patched package: https://launchpad.net/~martin.von.wittich/+archive/libwnck-nodimming

Add the software source ppa:martin.von.wittich/libwnck-nodimming to your computer and run sudo apt-key adv --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys C26F50B5 ; then start update-manager, check for updates and install them. After you relogin, the icons should no longer be greyed out.
This will of course be reverted as soon as Ubuntu releases another update for libwnck, but I'll try to keep at it and patch the updates too.

[Patrick (patrick-schweizer-ing)]

Hi Martin,

thanks a lot for your patch! This "feature" was driving me nuts. I looked for a long time on the Internet until I found your solution. I installed it and the fading was gone :-)
Vielen Dank!

Recently I upgrade to Ubuntu 10.4 though and your patch stopped working :-(
Will you make a new patch for the new Ubuntu release? That would be awesome. Or alternatively could you tell me what I need to do to undo this "feature".

Thanks!

Patrick