I'm having a bit of trouble getting the new panels to appear and behave the same as the old ones (transparency and prefs aside).

- The background of the old panels could be set to colour gradient (the settings had a dual colourwheel) - the new ones have only a single colourwheel. That kinda buggers things up for me to begin with.

- When setting the background to 'image' (as a workaround for the above) the drag gadget is unaffected, and remains an unpleasant grey block. Is there any way to configure this?
[EDIT]
Additionally, when a bacground image has been set, the background flashes between the image and 'grey' during the zipping/unzipping animation. I thought this may be due to a slowdown in compositing during the animation, but it also occurs when the panels are fully opaque.
[/EDIT]

- The new panels can be dragged about the screen by the drag gadget, even when locked.

On the plus side, I'm liking the configurability of effects for drag'n'drop and hover. The default look is also nice, and complements the default ferox theme nicely.

Moving the prefs into Ambient pref makes sense, although I still think it should be accessible from the panel RMB context menu. This could also (usefully) navigate to the settings of the specific panel selected, since it can get difficult to find which panel is which in the panel settings list tree when you have 6 or 7 panels configured.

Also, goodbye to Ambient's longstanding, and underused, 'Objects' menu entry.

As an aside, wouldn't it be a good idea to herd the screenbar settings (currently found by right-clicking on the window depth gadget) towards the Ambient settings at some point, another lost sheep in need of guidance imho.

[ Edited by boot_wb 03.06.2013 - 11:08 ]

Just a few hints/notes:

Old panels used some MUI-internal stuff for backgrounds (the same you get when setting the backgrounds for other MUI-windows), this doesn't work when transperancy comes into play.

The drag-gadget is offcourse unaffected (would be quite hard to make out), but you can just hide it (will reappear when mouse is over it).

"Locked" really just refers to wether dropped objects will be inserted or used as arguments for the app they were dropped over. Not really sure wether fixing a position should really be mixed into that option. There might be more options on positioning later on.

I couldn't reproduce your GFX-issues while zipping here. What HW did it happen on ? Do you have "enhanced display" active ?

And last, screenbars are NOT part of Ambient, so they have no place in Ambient-Prefs.

Quote:

Ah, thankyou for that. At least I know there's a reason.

Quote:
[whiny voice]On the old panels... [/whiny voice] only the (white) arrow of the drag gadget remained unaffected. The drag-gadget background conformed to the colouring of the panel. It looks much nicer that way.

Quote:

[whiny voice]On the old panels... [/whiny voice] locking also locked the position of the panel. This makes a lot of sense when you use the 'zipping' aspect of panels, since you don't want to accidentally drag your panel around when trying to zip/unzip. Can we have this back, pretty please?

Quote:

Powerbook 5,6 and yes, along with double/triple buffering. I think I've figured it out - it happens pretty fast, must have had some cpu load the first time slowing it down a bit to make it more visible.

When unzipping, the mouse coursor is (obviously) above the drag/zip gadget. As the panel unzips, each icon appears under the drag gadget (and cursor), and briefly flashes (depending upon the 'highlight' icon effect chosen in prefs).
It appears that during the unzipping animation, all icons flash their 'highlight' effect at once, so as each new icon appears under the mouse pointer/zip gadget the whole panel sort-of flashes. It's more noticable when using a high contrast (eg the 'negative') highlight icon effect.

Quote:

Fair enough. I do think they belong somewhere other than where they are though.