Bug 302717

Created attachment 72203 [details]
white progress bar on white background

Created attachment 72204 [details]
gray progress bar on gray background

Confirmed here. 
It works on rather dark backgrounds, but with white backgrounds the contrast is way too low.

Created attachment 72332 [details]
screenshot of style in 4.8.85

Style of progress bar changed again in 4.8.95 but still not much contrast there...

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=303533 — looks i made a duplicate, didn't find this bug with regular search (i searched for "meter", because that is a meter).

Marco Martin (notmart) told me in irc that he will increase the background contrast.

Git commit 42f4cc57fde9d1ccc9de42853b11e996df117539 by Marco Martin.
Committed on 16/07/2012 at 21:54.
Pushed by mart into branch 'KDE/4.9'.

more contrast
Related: bug 303533
FIXED-IN:4.9

M  +-    --    desktoptheme/air/widgets/bar_meter_horizontal.svgz
M  +-    --    desktoptheme/air/widgets/bar_meter_vertical.svgz

http://commits.kde.org/kde-runtime/42f4cc57fde9d1ccc9de42853b11e996df117539

I did not (yet) check the look from master, but as a suggestion, you could also use the same blue, which is used in sliders for example, for the progressing part of the element.

I'm reopening this one as I've just updated to 4.9 and the progress bars are still really hard to read. Please, use an other color, like blue for example or make the background darker or make the progress lighter. Sliders are blue in other plasmoids, why not use this color ?

Added to the Extra Mile

I can only agree: On a white background, the new progress bars are very hard to "read". And since most windows are mostly white (black text on white background), this is almost always the case. A clear visual regression compared to KDE 4.8.

Well, I'm testing the 4.10 beta and this is getting worser as more plasma widget are turned into QML ones.

It concerns a lot of things, as it's now hard to see :
* screen brightness
* volume levels
* any progress indicator moving in circles (the notification one, the disk mounting one)
* wifi power in NetworkManager

Please, use a simple blue color instead (just like in QML scrolling bars, for example in the battery status one).

I have no idea what's the amount of work to change this. Please give me a pointer to where I should look to make this change and create a patch.

Thanks

> Well, I'm testing the 4.10 beta and this is getting worser as more plasma widget are turned into QML ones.

Strange. It's getting better for me, because the QML widgets have a clear separator between the filled and not filled part.

Created attachment 75670 [details]
QML variant. Zoom in, it has a separator.

Created attachment 75671 [details]
The volume OSD. It doesn't have a separator.

>Well, I'm testing the 4.10 beta and this is getting worser as more plasma widget are turned into QML ones.

>It concerns a lot of things, as it's now hard to see :
>* screen brightness
>* volume levels
>* wifi power in NetworkManager
Are you sure any of that is QML a widget?

>* any progress indicator moving in circles (the notification one, the disk mounting one)
Good for me in 4.10 because of a separator.

s/QML a widget/a QML widget/

Created attachment 75716 [details]
Space left on device. Not too hard to read, but not pleasant either

Space left on device. Not too hard to read, but not pleasant either.

Created attachment 75717 [details]
Progress indicator example

The new left to right filling indicator is great, but the line part moving in circle is not clearly visible.

Created attachment 75719 [details]
Wireless power hard to read

Ok, this one may not be a QML app (I don't konw) but it's still using the KDE theme colors (I hope).

Created attachment 75720 [details]
A good example

According to me, this is the colors which should be used in those progress/status indicators. It should make thing much clearer. Please, give me a hint on where I should look for in order to change this and make a patch.

The lack of proper contrast in Plasma's progress bars is till an issue in KDE 4.10.1.

Created attachment 78465 [details]
How it could (almost) look like

I tried to make it the same color suggested in comment #20, I made it fast so there is some very evident mistakes, but the intention was to see whether I actually liked it or not and I actually think it's better than the old one, judge yourselves.

The file(s) to modify are in /usr/share/kde4/apps/desktoptheme/default/widgets ; it's "bar_meter_horizontal.svgz" and the -vertical . The colors are copied from slider.svgz .

That's not just contrasts, there needs to be a separator, which (as I was told) couldn't be easily done without porting to QML.

A separator would solve this issue in a nice way.

See  http://bugsfiles.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=75670 (QML with a separator), compare it with http://bugsfiles.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=75671 (no separator).

Created attachment 78483 [details]
blue progress bar again

I agree, the separator surely makes it easier to see, yet the choice of colors is not the luckiest one I believe, here is how it'd look like with separator and contrast f.ex.

Any chance the artist team could have a look at this problem? The KDE default theme has a few contrast issues, which greatly decrease the usability of the entire desktop. Even though I really like most of the theme and artwork, these few poor choices continue to spoil the entire experience.

Progress bars in Plasma 5 are blue, against a light gray background. The contrast is much better now.