adjust panel opacity for contrast with wallpaper

[Danielle Foré]

For Isis, I really want the panel to be as transparent as possible. David and I have been rocking the transparent panel and I've been seeing lots of screenshots of users adjusting their panel opacity to really low levels.

We should grab the lightest color in the panel area and contrast check it against white. Then set the panel opacity such that we meet contrast expectations for WCAG.

This should hopefully result in a completely transparent or nearly transparent panel for most users most of the time without causing any problems for users with really bright wallpapers.

[Jacob Parker (jacobparker1992)]

Might be worth considering the variance of the brightnesses. I feel chequered wallpapers would need an additional background

[Victor Martinez (victored)]

Interesting idea. I have some inquiries:

Would it be okay if we got rid of CSS theming support for the panel bar, or do you still want to have some control over that?

Should the panel still display a shadow?

Do you want the panel to go fully opaque for maximized windows?

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

Yea that's fine we can get rid of the CSS theming. If there's a way to have both, that would probably be nice for third parties, but I'm all aboard the transparent panel train.

No, let's kill the shadow

Yes that would rock! And actually, if we could paint a small piece underneath the window (where the corners are) that would be good too so we could have rounded corners for maximized windows.

[Jacob Parker (jacobparker1992)]

http://pastebin.com/ciSD0J8M

This code does that- it's not implemented in wherever you would put such a code, but it works. If it gets used, I want the bounty to be redistributed among other bounties.

[Jacob Parker (jacobparker1992)]

Victor,

Looking at it, I would say just override the background opacity CSS theming. Then when the desktop background is changed, calculate the opacity with my script, save a setting for the background opacity, and dbus to Wingpanel for it to update.

[Jacob Parker (jacobparker1992)]

I have completed this bug, but suck so hard at Bazaar. I sent Daniel a tar file of the code on G+.

[Jacob Parker (jacobparker1992)]

If anybody feels like putting it on Launchpad for me, it's at https://www.dropbox.com/s/qhqrpnjtznlsvfr/opacity-setting.tar.gz

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

Pushed the branch and linked here.

[Jacob Parker (jacobparker1992)]

I'll reiterate what was said on the branch—

This branch won't work on its own.

It can get very messy checking if the top of the wallpaper image isn't what is seen on the top of the screen—as in if it's a portrait image and they set it to show the whole image, there will be issues. Though for the default wallpapers, fix does work (on normal monitors).

There is, however, a setting to auto-update the opacity with the image, and another setting to change the opacity.

I think it would be best to have these settings in the settings: a dropdown for Wingpanel that is ‘auto adjust’, ‘transparent’, and ‘opaque’.