Liferea Blog: Transparent Tray Icon

24 June 2007

Transparent Tray Icon

Since several releases the tray icon transparency was broken. After giving up on fixing it for several weeks with several implementation prototypes the current releases now make a compromise:

No transparency (only theme background color) when you have the tray icon with new count display enabled.

Full transparency when you have the tray icon without new count enabled.

The reason why transparency does not work with new item count display enabled is that to draw the number one has to aquire and install a GTK drawing widget which itself is not transparent and additionally there is no reasonable way to get the "real" background below the widget to draw it into the widget whenever necessary (first rendering, after panel movement, after panel sliding...).

So to allow the user to decide how important transparency is, for the configuration variant without new item count rendering, the old code supporting transparency (using a GtkImage widget) is used. And if you absolutely want to see the new item count number you have to live with a non-transparent icon background, which should be ok when you use non-transparent panels. To change the settings have a look at the preferences tab "GUI".

Solution in upcoming 1.2.18 and 1.4-RC1

8 comments:

Anonymous said...: Hmmm, I running 1.2.17, and tried both settings. Neither seems to give the desired result of having the tray icon being transparent.; 28 June, 2007 21:43
Lars said...: Sorry. The versions have to be 1.2.18 and 1.4-RC1 and not the current ones. I'll correct this...; 29 June, 2007 00:02
Kimiko said...: Heya Lars!
I prefer the transparent tray icon, but would it be possible to either
- change the icon when there are new/unread items?
- show a tooltip with the number of new/unread items when hovering the cursor over the icon?; 30 July, 2007 02:36
Lars said...: Kimiko: The current implementation only changes the tray icon when there are new items. It changes from a lighter shade to normal shade. There is no visual indication when additional new items arrive. This is similar to what most mail application tray icons do.

There is no graphical indication when you have old unread items, but I think this is not necessary, because you need to open the application anyway to see those.

As for having a tooltip displaying new and unread count: this is already implemented and works for me fine.; 30 July, 2007 22:16
Kimiko said...: Ah, I see. The difference between the 'no news' and 'news' icons is very small, you really have to look closely to see it. May I suggest something more easily seen?; 31 July, 2007 16:36
Lars said...: kimiko: I do not agree. The contrast difference is IMO quite noticable. I do not want to change the icons in the stable 1.2.x line.

But using for example Pango themes you are free to exchange the icons for your own installation.; 31 July, 2007 18:05
Anonymous said...: Wow to think above mentioned is still the case - however I found this and now got a transparent icon again by disabled the counter :); 19 May, 2009 16:21
Lars said...: Right now Hubert Figuiere is working on a new implementation that could support transparency in all cases. There is a patch in the SF tracker.; 19 May, 2009 20:05