Recently, the UI team of the LAXCUS cluster operating system development team has made some micro improvements to the LAXCUS desktop taskbar, following a few guiding principles:
1. The GUI components continue to deepen the flat design.
2. The color tone of the component icons is light blue. Through our user tracking surveys and long-term comparisons, regardless of the desktop skin state, the light blue tone provides the best visual effect for users.
3. Slightly increase the size of the GUI components while adjusting the pixel spacing between components. This can achieve higher clarity, improve user experience, and avoid the visual confusion caused by the original GUI components being overly crowded together.
Below are the comparison images of the old and new LAXCUS cluster operating system desktop environments. You can feel the changes.
（Laxcus cluster operating system version 5.3 desktop environment）
（Laxcus cluster operating system version 5.2 desktop environment）
Specifically, compared to the Laxcus version 5.2 desktop taskbar, the version 5.3 desktop taskbar has the following changes:
1. The taskbar height has increased by 4-10 pixels based on the color of the desktop skin and different fonts, meeting users’ comfort (when selecting different skin interfaces, the system will calculate and automatically adjust to find the best size; this is not easy to perceive, only those who have used it can feel the change).
2. The tray icons on the right side of the taskbar, which used to be crowded together regardless of functionality, are now separated by a divider according to icon functions, increasing the pixel spacing. The two icons related to the network: communication and cluster service icons are separated and placed on the far right. The “date and time” is placed as a separate group, displaying both date and time information, with time on top in bold font, and date below in regular font. To their left are several other system icons: “Edge Computing Agent”, “Sound”, “User Properties”. The LAXCUS Edge Computing Agent is responsible for connecting terminals, edge, and cloud while ensuring sufficient security for the cloud, providing integrated distributed computing services at the cloud edge. If the distributed application software installed by the user needs to display in the task tray, they will be displayed as a separate group, apart from these system icons. Since this application software does not have a user tray icon, it is temporarily not displayed.
3. On the left side, next to the “Start” menu, a group of tray icons has been added, currently including the “Show Desktop” icon.
4. The biggest improvement this time is in the “application software” section of the taskbar. Originally, this section had a style similar to the Windows desktop, with all application software icons crowded together. If there are not many application software, the user experience feels little different, but if there are too many application software, displaying them crowded together increases users’ sense of pressure and tension. Therefore, we have improved this design: specifying the display size for each application software, and if it exceeds the display area, the excess application software will be hidden. At the same time, arrow buttons will automatically appear on both sides to allow users to click left or right to reveal the hidden application software.