Design proposal for the menu

[krille-chan]

Description of the feature

Hey, another simple design proposal: Make the indicators menu a little bit transparent.

The menu is "over" the current app. The user can use this menu without leaving his app. With a transparent effect, it feels more like that he is still in his app and just makes a quick action at the top menu. Also he could still get some information about a change in the current app, for example: I want to look at the calender but in my messenger is a new message. Maybe it is to dark to read the message, but I can see that:

-There has something changed -The message is very long or very short

For more asthetic: A light blur effect could be a nice eye candy. :-)

Illustrations

[PhoenixLandPirate]

This should have a tint scaler like the scope background.

[krille-chan]

@PhoenixLandPirate I dont think that this is a good idea. Maybe in a design settings app which fans can install from the openstore but the job of the OS is, to provide a system, that works out of the box with every background. It is not the job of the user to make the system look awesome.

[PhoenixLandPirate]

I disagree, even gnome, which gets complaints about lack of customizability, requires either users, or distrobution designers to make gnome look good, by default it looks horrid.

Of cause we should make unity 8 look great by default, but we can't make something that looks universally amazing, some people liked the orange accent, some people thought it better to be blue.

There was massive arguments about accent colours, because people disagree, so I think having sliders and colour options where you can, is overall good, we can still have arguments about what's default, but still able to make it your own if you disagree.

KDE plasma is a great example of a fantastic desktop where users have choice.

I think customizability is important, and if you dont like transparency, you should be able to turn them off, if you like it a lot you should be able to make it heavy.

Just like you can do in KDE, Gnome and many other de's.

[PhoenixLandPirate]

Also perhaps a added blur to the background would be good, this is what Mac, Windows, iOS, KDE and some others do when things are transparent.

[krille-chan]

Hm yes in general. We could let the user choose what he likes but the slider means he can choose the opacity to make the opacity fit with the image. But this should change automatically. So it would be better to offer a switch, where the user can set the transparency on or off.

[PhoenixLandPirate]

I guess that depends what's in the background, these things aren't always accurate to how people view it, I think by default it should be done automatically, but letting people also have access to a slider would be nice if they dont like whats automatic.

[mateosalta]

perhaps we could start with the effect the dash is using, then apply that to the current apps screen (like how app switcher takes a sceen for unloaded apps) then we could tint darker.

the argments against is that

• just trnsparency over text over tex makes things hard to read - thus me should have the blur too
• live blur effect is resource intensive, so we need to do a quick blur on an image to be more effective

[Fuseteam]

from my experience of attempting transparency on the terminal setting the opacity around 80% while the text is fully opaque makes the text perfectly readable while providing a nice aesthetic

also I just noticed background of the launcher is actually transparent :thinking:

[mateosalta]

from my experience of attempting transparency on the terminal setting the opacity around 80% while the text is fully opaque makes the text perfectly readable while providing a nice aesthetic

also I just noticed background of the launcher is actually transparent thinking

it is a fake transparency, taking only the background and blurring, I think we should use the same method that the launcher uses

[Fuseteam]

from my experience of attempting transparency on the terminal setting the opacity around 80% while the text is fully opaque makes the text perfectly readable while providing a nice aesthetic also I just noticed background of the launcher is actually transparent thinking

it is a fake transparency, taking only the background and blurring, I think we should use the same method that the launcher uses

I mean I know the drawer is fake transparency, but the launcher too? i noticed I actually see the application that is in the foreground through the launcher

[mateosalta]

oh, I sorry I meant the drawer. we should use the drawer method, maybe a bit darker