Calendar date is unreadable when using Ambience theme

Adding in ayatana-design to get design feedback on it. Marking as incomplete in indicator-datetime as we'll need that feedback before making any code changes.

When theses feedback comin?

elmo: can you attach a screenshot if you're still seeing this; I can't replicate it on natty:

Oops, that got posted instead of the attachment, I of course /can/ reproduce it on natty under both Luminance and Radiance as shown (see attachment).

The problem is an extremely low-contrast between text that needs to be read, and the background colour. It appears that it might be being rendered using the "disabled menu item" colour choices, but that probably isn't suitable for text that actually needs to be understood by the user.

I presume that the bottom of the two pieces of text "Time & Date Settings..." (and the specifc one that James originally spotted) is intended to be a menu-item link again long-term of this should be considered when doing any mockups to try and solve this.

Perhaps the solution would be to make the top date a clickable menu-item that resets the calendar to the current date (currently the calendar doesn't provide any indication the user whether the highlighted date is the current one, which can be misleading if forgotten).

Root cause is probably bug #627796 ("Disabled text in menu bar is nearly invisible").

The root cause is that we need a new item type to represent "informational" items, as opposed to disabled menu items used to represent informational elements.

This needs to be supported at the level of dbusmenu and be used explicitely by apps or system services.

Design has not had the time to provide feedback yet, so marking again as incomplete.

I think we could relate this to bug #709434; that the calendar widget is too complicated for its task as well. That bug is currently filed as a theme issue, but maybe a good solution is to have a custom informational calendar widget. The current calendar widget was designed for selecting a date; something we don't actually _use_ in the datetime indicator. It would make sense for that custom widget to display the current date as a label, since how that is presented is dependent on the calendar itself.

On the other hand, now that the day of the week and date can be shown in the indicator label by choosing them in the settings, is it really necessary to show them again on top of the calendar?

Marking as triaged - if we accept the logic behind David's comment #6 the work item here is to figure out if/how to support informational menu items (and then codify the outcome of that ofcourse).

Marking as incomplete for dbusmenu if the bug is that there needs to be a new way to express information then it's not yet ready to code for dbusmenu and needs more information.

Marking as confirmed for design as design is needed to say how this type of information should be visualized.

I believe it's the same root-cause that makes Skype have unreadable menus too.

is that on the list of issues to fix this cycle?

With a recent change this might be fixed; https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/indicator-datetime/+bug/740819

the idea is the date item will be sensitive when evolution is installed.

I'm marking this as fix-released because the package now does not make the date insensitive all the time. If evolution is installed it will be insensitive and will show up dim and difficult to read.

I imagine eventually this will be fixed in some universal way in that all insensitive menu items will become more readable.

This is not the same issue which effects skype as far as I can tell.

Sorry to correct what I wrote, if evolution ISN'T installed it'll show up insensitive.