UI: Show legends for those progress bars on the right side.

[WhyNotHugo]

blueman: 2.2.2
BlueZ: n/a
Distribution: ArchLinux
Desktop environment: swaywm (wayland)

This is what my main blueman windows looks like:

There's three bars on the right side, but I never remember what they are. At the same time, there's a huge amount of empty/unused space.

I'd like to propose rotating those progress bars (so they're horizontal), and adding a readable label to each one. Actually, the entire contents of the tooltip could be included there. There's two issues going about here: lots of unused space, and information too condensed and hard to read. I think they can both cancel each other out.

This is mostly a UI/UX improvement, but also allows keyboard-only users to figure out those bars -- currently only hovering them gives an indicator of what they are.

It doesn't necessarily have to be progress bars either, small tags with percent indicators might work too (keeping colour coding as well):

I'm not entirely sure what layout is best though; if they have "reserved" positions (so they layout matches on all devices), or only render ones with data (devices with different bars will have them in different orders, but they flow would be more natural).

What are your thoughts? Would you rather see a PR and start of discussion there?

[cschramm]

First thoughts first: Empty / unused space is not an argument as it's just due to the window size. 😄

I absolutely do not like the current state of the indicators both visually and functional and personally find your tags quite appealing.

Regarding functional: In many cases we only show more or less "default" and thus pointless values now. I just created #1642 to make some changes visible: The pointless link quality value will go away completely and the others will probably be absent in a lot of cases as well. I'd still keep the values for cases where they make sense. For other cases we'll probably need another connection indicator.

If I remember correctly (it aged well 😬), the code in #1642 will also drop the weird spacing where the battery indicator of your MX Vertical floats in open space by putting all bars into a single tree cell. I'd definitely go without "reserved" positions.

A PR is always welcome. Feel free to pick changes from #1642 as they fit you.

Also curious about @infirit's thoughts on this.

[varlesh]

My concept. Idea this style - move all status info too right with symbolic icons.

[cschramm]

My cent: Nice! 😄

[infirit]

First thoughts first: Empty / unused space is not an argument as it's just due to the window size. smile

There are still a lot of people running on older hardware with small screens. We'll need to check how things look at lower resolution like 1280x786.

edit: here is it on 1280x786 (yes I'm on kde now, don't judge me 🤣 )

Regarding functional: In many cases we only show more or less "default" and thus pointless values now. I just created #1642 to make some changes visible: The pointless link quality value will go away completely and the others will probably be absent in a lot of cases as well. I'd still keep the values for cases where they make sense. For other cases we'll probably need another connection indicator.

I do like to see some connection quality to show as I have devices that for some reason sometimes can't establish a proper connection. However it is too inconsistent which makes it pretty useless for a lot of devices. I rather not show it at all if I'm being honest (I hate we don't have a proper dbus api to get this for all connected devices 😞 )

The concept in #1620 (comment) does look like a good alternative. But I hate the lack of colours but let's have that discussion on the symbolic PR :-)

[cschramm]

The concept in #1620 (comment) does look like a good alternative. But I hate the lack of colours

Well, I considered it the symbolic version of the concept. The "non-symbolic" version can have colors of course.

[WhyNotHugo]

Building on the above design, how about splitting things into two columns? Feels less cramped:

I made this with GIMP, please don't judge the misalignments.

Perphaps icons on the left of texts also matches the style on the left better too.

[infirit]

I have been experimenting with a new view widget for the devicelist, see #1768. One of the key benefits it's fully themeable with CSS. The current widget is not.