Skip navigation.
KDE Developer's Journals
Home » blogs » richard dale's blog

Showing active/inactive windows in KDE4

richard dale's picture
Submitted by richard dale on Sat, 09/15/2007 - 14:18.

There has been some discussion on the kde-core-devel mailing list about a change to how the active window should be distinguished from the inactive windows, where different color palettes are used for the widgets inside inactive windows.

I tried out the change yesterday, testing flipping between Konsole and Dolphin, and don't personally like it much. Here are a couple of screen shots of what I saw so you can judge for yourself (with a KDE3 kicker in there):

Konsole at front with Dolphin
Konsole at front with Dolphin

Konsole with Dolphin at front
Konsole with Dolphin at front

» richard dale's blog | login or register to post comments | 3904 reads

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.
jamadagni's picture

I don't like it. Like the

Submitted by jamadagni on Mon, 09/17/2007 - 01:29.

I don't like it. Like the other guy said, shadow effects should be used for this. Not different colorsets.

» login or register to post comments
eean's picture

Composite++

Submitted by eean on Sat, 09/15/2007 - 20:26.

I agree, this is the sort of thing composites are supposed to be used for. Shadow the whole window... changing the color scheme of all the widgets is kind of a hack.

» login or register to post comments
suslik's picture

Overkill?

Submitted by suslik on Sat, 09/15/2007 - 18:02.

Shading the whole window from inside of the toolkit seems like an overkill.

Turn on composite, and have the shadows = instant visual, more natural indicator of which window is on top.

» login or register to post comments
richard dale's picture

Re: Overkill?

Submitted by richard dale on Sat, 09/15/2007 - 20:18.

Yes, I tried doing the same thing on Mac OS X, and found out that the active window has a deeper drop shadow.

» login or register to post comments
sad eagle's picture

For a default option, a form

Submitted by sad eagle on Sat, 09/15/2007 - 17:48.

For a non-default option, a form of it seems to be frigheningly default --- half of my text here looks grey, including all in form widgets in khtml. Lots of widgets just look disabled.

» login or register to post comments
superstoned's picture

test

Submitted by superstoned on Sat, 09/15/2007 - 14:43.

to be fair, you should mention this is only a test to see if it technically works. The idea is to have something much more subtle, and if you see it with the oxygen theme, it's already a lot better. You gave the example of Mac OS X, which changes the colors of scrollbar, selected txt and some other stuff... I'm for having the ability to do something like that, and Matthew is working on it. That's good, right? He maybe should've tested it just at home, but it's configurable now and we can find out how we want it.

» login or register to post comments
sad eagle's picture

No, to be fair, he needs to

Submitted by sad eagle on Sat, 09/15/2007 - 16:43.

No, to be fair, he needs to show all the intermediate frames of it flickering back and forth. It doesn't matter whether it's subtle or not subtle -- that Qt "feature" simply doesn't work right.

» login or register to post comments
richard dale's picture

Re: test

Submitted by richard dale on Sat, 09/15/2007 - 14:59.

to be fair, you should mention this is only a test to see if it technically works.

No, this is code in the KDE4 trunk, not a test branch, and hence all the discussion about the change on kde-core-devel. Is this screenshot using the Oxygen theme? I don't actually know.

» login or register to post comments
superstoned's picture

Oxygen got many criticism

Submitted by superstoned on Sat, 09/15/2007 - 16:43.

Oxygen got many criticism about it's colours - but nobody looked at the mockups. The code wasn't ready, the pale colours where a todo.

Same goes for this. This effect is supposed to be hardly noticeable, what you see in the screenshot is just its first incarnation. It has already been improved, the background doesn't change anymore.

Codewise it seems a pretty small thing to me... 6 lines, right? So falling over Matthew because he 'threatened the stability of trunk' seems a bit too much.

And your screenshot shows plastik.

» login or register to post comments
richard dale's picture

Re: Oxygen got many criticism

Submitted by richard dale on Sat, 09/15/2007 - 17:08.

Codewise it seems a pretty small thing to me... 6 lines, right? So falling over Matthew because he 'threatened the stability of trunk' seems a bit too much.

I've no idea about the number of lines of code, but this was checked into the trunk as the default option. Fortunately, after discussion on k-c-d, afterwards it was made a configurable non-default option. People reported unacceptable flickering and other problems, and so it so did indeed threaten the stability of the trunk. For instance, can you not see that the screenshot I have posted is crap?

» login or register to post comments

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.