More on Sezen panel applet

There has been quite some work on both Sezen and the panel applet since my last post, and here's what's new on that front:

We went through quite a few design iterations of the applet, here is the evolution:
At first, we had the main Sezen widget which was stuffed in a menu, but as I mentioned in my previous post, I found this sub-optimal, as navigating in menu is not the same as doing so in a standalone window, and therefore I wanted the browser-like menu, which came to life in the third iteration, but the problem with it was that even though we had thumbnails (though not in the image), they were totally unhelpful, as they were too small. So the fourth iteration introduced three rows of text per each item, which allowed a big thumbnail on the right, but then some items had only one icon on the left, some had one on left and one on the right, and this just felt weird, so I tried to remove the icons from the left and have all of them on the right, but as you can see in the fifth image, this also doesn't look right, so the idea of thumbnails on the right was abandonded, and we ended up with medium-sized thumbnails on the left as you can see in the last image.

There are still a few loose ends in the applet (clicking on the scroll bar doesn't work most of the time, since scrollbar was never meant to be inside menu, and therefore isn't trivial to fix), and it could also use a global hotkey to popup the search. But even now I find it very usable if one has enough stuff logged by Zeitgeist.

Since Seif still thought that standard Sezen window is the way to go (with which I obviously don't agree), there's also another version of the applet, which just opens undecorated Sezen under the menu item position:
And yea, I agree that it looks nice (especially with elementary theme), but is practically unusable only with keyboard, which I find a deal breaker (also it doesn't close if you click some other window... though this could be implemented, standard menu does it automatically).

Now I wonder about the future of the applet, should we try to fix the issues it has and push it upstream, or turn it into a widget which any app can use (it'd just tell us which mimetypes it's interested in and it would augment the "Open file" function). Also which version is really better? (but please judge by using them, not by looking at the screenshots)

Links to get the code:
https://code.launchpad.net/~elementaryart/gnome-applets/sezen
https://code.launchpad.net/~elementaryart/gnome-applets/sezen2

To install you need to get the branch, its dependencies and run:
./autogen --prefix=/usr && cd sezen && make && sudo make install
Of course you should substitute the "sudo make install" with your distro's equivalent.

PS. For those interested here's my GSoC report for this week: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-soc-list/2010-July/msg00050.html

Comments

  1. Are you aware that deskbar-applet already does something very similar, too? Furthermore, why do you spend time writing a panel applet if they are going to die in gnome 3 anyway?

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  2. i use the applet a lot. i like the way it evolves.
    it needs work (like closing when hitting ESC or when clickng to an app ) but please keep improving it.
    i think i find this version more functional than the others : http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_eXLL3mWKz5U/TEMEYqw_QSI/AAAAAAAAAEk/LHjbH2L0iI4/s1600/Screenshot-11.png

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  3. @sebp: Well panel applet part of it is ~20 lines of code, the rest is more than 2000... Also last time I checked deskbar-applet was far from consistent with the menu.

    @Γουργιώτης Γιώργος: It already does that for quite some time, you should update ;) Also yea, the screenshot you like is the latest look (which I don't intend to change atm).

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  4. Could you screenshot the websites talk for me? I'd like it for the opening talk at GUADEC. Thanks :)

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  5. Arggh... websites *tab*.

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  6. @Luis: Here you go http://ubuntuone.com/p/9x5/

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  7. Your version is better especially the last iteration. In sezen, I would never know where my file is located.

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