Kasbar - The Next Generation

I'm in the process of improving the Kasbar taskbar replacement, and as there seems to be a fair degree of interest I thought I'd outline what I've done so far and my plans. My first aim (which I have nearly achieved) was to ensure that Kasbar had all the features of the standard taskbar, but I have quite a bit more in mind...

Kasbar was originally written by Mosfet as a kicker applet, and has always had a pretty cool look. Shortly before the release of 2.0 support for external applets was removed because the API sucked, which unfortunately meant that Kasbar would no longer work. Mathias Elter's recent work adding a panel extension system to kicker meant that the time was ripe for Kasbar to return, so over the weekend I ported the code to the new API.

My first port was just that: a direct port of the original Kasbar applet code, but once I had it working properly I began to add some new features. So far I've added the following:

• Improved left mouse click behaviour
  If you click on the icon for the active window then Kasbar will now minimise it, clicking on inactive or minimised windows activates them as before. The new behaviour is consistent with the standard taskbar.
• Window menu
  You can now access the window menu by right-clicking on the windows icon. This is done by sending a DCOP message to KWin, so you get the complete set of options unlike the standard taskbar which only offers a subset of the available actions.
• Transparency
  I like the current Kasbar look, but I thought that a transparent Kasbar would look very cool. Adding this option to Kasbar was trivial because kdelibs has a KRootPixmap class which does all the hard work. In addition to simple transparency you also have the option to tint the background to a specified colour. The code for this is working, but won't be committed to the cvs for a few days because I have some more work to do to make it configurable.

Of course, I have some more features planned, I expect to have the following working in the near future:

• Shade indicator
  This should indicate that a window is shaded in a way that is consistent with the existing icons for minimised and normal windows. I have wirtten the code for this, but unfortunately this indicator does not work for some reason.
• Startup notification
  Kasbar should support startup notification in the same way as the standard taskbar. I've already started making changes to the implementation to support this, but there is still more work to be done.
• Tooltips
  I plan to add a tooltip displaying the complete window title. At the moment you can only see a small part of the title and the only way to see the rest is to look at the window itself.
• Window thumbnails
  I'd like to add a new feature offering thumbnails of minimised windows. The idea would be to grab the image of the window from the screen immediately before it is minimised then display a thumbnail of the image in some tooltip-like way. There are some issues with this but I think it would be pretty cool. It would of course be optional.

I'm very interested to hear what people think of my plans, so I'll be monitoring the comments posted here. If you have a feature request for Kasbar then now is the time to let me know.