V0.82

V0.82

V0.82 of the applet follows on from the recent release of MATE 1.20 and contains some changes relating to the way app scrolling works.

With the applet is used with MATE 1.20 app icon scrolling is automatically enabled when it is needed - i.e. when the applet runs out of space on the panel to expand into - and is it automatically disabled when not needed e.g. when the applet is given more space by being moved, or when another applet is removed from the panel.

When the applet is moved about on the panel it can now also resize and become larger or smaller to make the best use of the available panel space in the same way that the window list applet does. The minimum size it will allow itself is 4 app icons.

Because the applet can now adjust itself to the available panel space, the dock size configuration options introduced in V0.81 are not needed with MATE 1.20 and do not appear in the preferences dialog. However, if the applet is used with an earlier version of MATE, they will still be there and can be used as before.

V0.81

There are a couple of major changes in this latest version of the applet.

The first is that the dock now supports scrolling of app icons. This is useful when the dock has limited space on its panel and will prevent it from expanding over other applets. To scroll app icons, the mouse pointer must be moved over either the first or last icon in the dock. If scrolling is possible in that direction, the app icon will darken and an arrow will be displayed over it.

If the mouse pointer hovers over an icon in this state, the dock will scroll in the indicated direction.
As with icons, the arrows are drawn using the current icon theme and their appearance will therefore vary from theme to theme.

App scrolling is automatically configured and enabled when using the Mutiny layout from Mate Tweak. When using any other layout scrolling can be enabled using a new preferences setting.

If 'Variable' is selected, scrolling is disabled and the dock will behave as in take as much space on the panel as it needs, possibly expanding over other applets as in previous versions. If 'Fixed' is selected, the dock will claim enough space to display the specfied number of app icons, and will begin scrolling icons when it contains more than this number.

A few things to note about scrolling:

• The implementation is still in an early state and bugs can be expected...
• It is Gtk3 only
• The current approach of setting scrolling on or off via a preferences item is a short term workaround while this issue with the MATE panel and python introspection is fixed. Once done, future versions of the applet will be able to automatically enable and disable app scrolling as and when needed.

The other big change for this version is that applet the no longer uses its own method of matching applications and instead uses the bamf library for this. What this means for users is that from now on the applet will be a lot better at matching applications and windows to their dock icons. For package maintainers it means the applet has the following new dependencies: bamfdaemon, libbamf and gir1.2-bamf

There are also two minor changes to mentions. Firstly, popup windows (action lists and window lists) no longer steal focus from other windows. Secondly, when using a solid fill for the active icon background, the contrast between the icon and the background has been improved.

Finally, a screenshot of V0.81 applet on Ubuntu Mate 18.04. Note that the dock is just about to scroll.

V0.80

This release of the applet contains some bug fixes and cosmetic improvements:

• Window lists and action lists now have rounded corners and point to their app's icon in the dock. Note: this requires Gtk3 and Python GObject bindings 3.26 or greater - with Gtk2 or with Gtk3 and PyGobject 3.25 or earlier, the old style of window and action lists will continue to be used.
• The delay before action lists appear when the mouse hovers over a dock icon can now be set in the preferences dialog.
• Apps can now be pinned to specific workspaces, in other words their app icons only appear in the dock when a particular workspace is active. This allows users to customise the dock for each workspace they use.
• When unpinning an app a notification is now displayed which allows the operation to be undone and re-pins the app to the dock.
• A bug has been fixed that would sometimes cause app icons to continually flash.
• The appearance of progress bars on dock icons has been improved.

Window and action lists

Now look like this:

and

Action list popup delay

This can now be in the preferences dialog. Here it is set to 0.7 seconds:

Pinning apps to workspaces

The preferences dialog now contains a settings that allows pinned apps to appear in the dock on all workspaces or only on the workspace where they were pinned.

Note that when this new setting is used for the first time, the dock will be cleared and it will be necessary to set up the pinned apps as required on each workspace. Once done, these settings will of course be retained. Also note the tip on the dialog box: when pinning apps to specific workspaces it can also be useful to make sure that unpinned apps from other workspaces are not displayed in the dock, and that indicators/window list items from other workspaces are also not displayed.

Unpinning apps

Unpinning an app now displays a notification e.g.:

If the Undo button is clicked, the app is re-pinned and placed back in the dock at its previous position.

Progress bars

Old progress bars were a bit scruffy looking:

but have now been tidied up a bit:

V0.79

V0.79

There are a couple of fixes in this version

• The applet no longer swallows key presses. This means it now works happily alongside other apps that also use the key, e.g. the Brisk menu, the Advanced Mate Menu or Albert. Thanks go to the folks over at Ubuntu MATE for providing this fix

• Crashes relating to Pango when window list and action list contents needed to be ellipsized have been fixed

V0.78

V0.78

There main changes in this version of the applet are:

• 5 new types of indicators have been added
• It is now possible to add space between dock icons
• When an app requires attention from the user, it is now possible to display a badge on the app's icon, rather than have it blink on and off

New Indicators

The new indicators are:

Circle:

Square:

Triangle:

Diamond:

and Subway:

(Multiple windows open)

(Multiple windows open and app is not active)

The preferences dialog has been updated to allow the new indicators to be selected:

On Gtk3 versions of the applet, the indicators will be drawn using the current theme's highlight colour. This is not possible with Gtk2 (e.g. on Ubuntu Mate 16.04), but it is possible to manually set a suitable colour using the Fallback colour option on the Misc tab of the preferences dialog.

App spacing

A new preferences option has been added which allows extra space to be added between dock icons.

Valid values are between 0 and 7.

0 - tightly packed

7 - a bit less cramped ....

Attention setting

A new preferences option has been added to select whether an app should blink its icon on and off, or just display a badge.

The badge (showing an exclamation mark) is displayed in the top left of the dock icon as below:

The colour of the badge will always match the icon and be easily distinguished.

V0.77

Some long requested features have been been added in this version of the applet:

Adding applications to the dock using drag and drop

Apps can now be added to the dock by dragging their icons off menu applets (Main Menu, Menu Bar, Advanced Menu and the new Brisk Menu are all supported) and onto the dock applet. This is for GTK3 versions of the applet only.

Dragging and dropping data between running applications

If data is dragged from an application onto another running application's dock icon, the new application will be made active allowing the dragged data to dropped onto it. This can be especially useful on small screens or single monitor setups. However, this is also for GTK3 only.

Keyboard shortcuts can now be used to activate and select applications in the dock.

The shortcuts are:

• <Super> 1 - 0 for the first 10 applications in the dock
• <Super><Alt> 1 - 0 for applications 10-20 in the dock

For example, to activate the 5th application, it would be necessary to hold down the Super key (i.e. the Windows) key and press 5. For the 12th application, it would be necessary to hold down both the Super key and the Alt key and press 2.

When these shortcuts are used, the effect is as follows:

• If the app is not running, it will be started.
• If the app is running and only has a single window open, the window will cycled between minimised and activated states.
• If the app is running and has multiple windows open, each use of the shortcut will activate and display each window in turn.

Minor changes

In addition to these new features the following changes have also been made to the applet:

• The Hints and Tips section of the About dialog has been updated with information regarding the new drag and drop and shortcut features.
• A bug has been fixed which would have prevented action and window lists from appearing

New Dependency

Finally, package maintainers need to note a new dependency of the applet - Keybinder. For example, on Arch Linux this is the libkeybinder-3.0 package, on Ubuntu 16.04 it is gir1.2-keybinder-0.0 and on Ubtuntu 16.10, gir1.2-keybinder-3.0

0.76

Changes in this release

• Added support for startup notification when launching apps.
• The applet gets a new look - a new type of indicator and a new type of active icon background have been added
• The About dialog has been reworked to hopefully be less ugly...

In detail

Startup Notification

When starting an app the icon in the dock will now continue to pulse until the app is fully loaded, providing a useful bit of visual feedback regarding the app's status. In previous versions of the applet, an icon would pulse only once.

New indicator and active icon background types

The applet has a new indicator type, a single solid bar, and a new active icon background type where the background is filled with a colour based on the app's icon. See below:

The preferences dialog has been updated to allow the user to choose which types of indicator and icon background to use, and displays a live preview:

When using Gtk3 versions of MATE, the bar indicator will be drawn using the highlight colour defined by the current Gtk3 theme. In the screenshots above the Arc Darker theme was used, hence the the blue bars. The screenshot below shows the Ambiant-Mate theme in use, along with appropriately green indicators.

For technical reasons it isn't possible to read the current theme's highlight colour on Gtk2 versions of MATE. Therefore bar indicators will be drawn in grey. Since this colour won't fit in well with many themes, a new preference option has been added which allows the colour of bar indicators to be specified. This can be found on the 'Misc' tab of the Preferences dialog.

Clicking on the colour button will display the standard Gtk colour selection dialog, from which a new bar colour can be chosen.

To accomplish all this, the code which relates to drawing dock items has been reworked. This will allow new types of indicator and active icon backgrounds to be more easily added in future.

About dialog

This now looks a bit nicer, and displays license and hints and tips info.

V0.75

Summary of changes included this version:

• a bug fix
• app actions have been removed from the window list and now have their own popup window, which can be disabled if required
• the window list now appears in response to a click on an app's icon when the app has more than one window open
• on Gtk3 action lists and window list colours should now match the panel
• the applet now integrates with the Compiz window manager to provide previews of an app's open windows

In detail...

Bug fix

Fixed bug where window lists could span monitors on multi monitor setups.

App actions

App actions - e.g. Pin/Unpin, Open New Incognito Window (for Google Chrome)- have been removed from the window list and now appear in place of the window list when the mouse hovers over an app's dock icon:

A new configuration item has been added to disable the action list popup for users who find them distracting:

If the popup is disabled, app actions can still be selected by right clicking on the app's dock icon:

Clicking on an app's icon

The configuration option that selects whether to restore all of a running app's windows or only the last active window when its dock icon is clicked has been removed. The effect of clicking an app's icon now depends on whether or not the app is running and how many windows it has open.

• If the app is not running, clicking its icon will start it
• If the app is running and has only a single window open, the window will be activated
• If the app is running and has more than one window open, the window list will be displayed (it can be dismissed by selecting a window, moving the mouse away from the applet and window list, or clicking the app's icon again)

As previously, shift-clicking a running app's icon will start a new instance of the app (not all apps support multiple instances however...)

Window lists

On MATE Gtk3, window lists and action list windows will now use colours from the Gtk theme and should match the panel:

On both Gtk2 and Gtk3, when a custom panel colour is set, window lists and action lists will use this colour for their background, and choose a suitable foreground colour to ensure that text is legible.

Integration with Compiz

A new configuration option has been added which allows the user to select whether to use the applet's built in window list for selecting windows, or to use Compiz:

For the Compiz option, note:

• Compiz must be being used as the window manager. This is easy to achieve with MATE Tweak.
• The Compiz Scale and DBus Plugins must be activated in Compiz Config Settings Manager. See below

When an app has more than one window open, clicking on it's dock icon will display previews of all of the open (and non-minimized) windows, e:g:

Important:

It seems that Compiz does not display or allowed selection of minimized windows in the Scale plugin or its Application Switcher (Alt-Tab replacement). This can cause problems when they need to be unminimized since it means that there's no way to select them. The easiest way to get around this is to use the dock's built in window cycling ability, i.e. by moving the mouse over the dock icon and using the mouse wheel to activate or restore each window in turn.

V0.74

Changes in this version:

Fix for improved matching of binary packaged apps on Gentoo.

Amended README.me to include the availability of an overlay for the applet on Gentoo.

Corrected position of window lists on non-expanded panels.

Fix for window list flickering on bottom aligned panels on MATE Gtk3

Increased the delay before window lists are shown when the mouse hovers over an app icon. It was 0.5 seconds, and is now 1 second.

Shortened pin/unpin window list text. It now says 'Pin ' rather than 'Pin to the dock', and the Unpin text is similarly shortened.

Fixed a bug that would cause Pin/Unpin actions to act upon previously highlighted app icons, rather than the one that is currently highlighted.

When starting to drag an app icon, the window list is now hidden.

The applet can now display progress bars and counts on app icons for apps which support this. See below:

This screenshot (taken on Ubuntu Mate 16.10 Alpha 2) shows Firefox downloading a single file, the Cumulus weather app displaying the current temperature, and the Ubuntu software updater installing updates.

A couple of things to note about progress bars and counts:

• libunity needs to be installed for this new feature to work. Getting libunity on an Ubuntu based distro is easy (and it will probably be installed by default, as is the case with Ubuntu MATE) but its availability may vary on other distros... The applet will still work without problem if libunity is not installed, but obviously will not display counts or progress bars.
• Firefox needs this extension detailed on OMGUbuntu to display download counts and progress bars.

V0.73

Drag and drop rearranging of dock icons has finally been implemented. Unfortunately, this is only for the GTK3 version of the applet. Its just not possible to do this sort of thing with Python and GTK2, so GTK2 users are going to be forever stuck with the clunky old method...

The window list which appears when the mouse hovers over a dock icon has been reworked. This is how it used to look:

And this is how it looks now:

Aside from the new look and the fact that app window titles are ellipsized when they get too long, there are a few things to note. Firstly, any additional actions that the app supports are now shown at the top of the window list. In the screenshot above Chrome has two for opening new windows. These actions were previously available from the dock right click menu, but here they're more readily accessible.

Secondly, the option to pin/unpin the app is now always shown at the bottom of the list. Again, this is to make it more accessible.

Lastly, when a window is selected the window list no longer closes afterwards. This is to make switching and cycling between multiple open windows much more convenient and much less annoying. To close the window list, simply move the mouse away from it....

The new window lists work on both GTK2 and GTK3 - the above screenshots were GTK2, the one below is GTK3 on Ubuntu MATE 16.10 Alpha 1:

Note that the separators in this screenshot appear narrower than in the others because a different GTK theme is being used and it draws separators differently... Also note that further changes to the window list will follow in the future, and it is still work in progress.

The final change for this release is that the way in which the dominant colour of the current wallpaper is calculated has been changed is and is now quicker and lighter on resources than before.