The power of team work

Some months ago when the #kwin Channel was created I decided to stop by and ask the wonderful people there about some weird ideas I had about shadows and fixing the bad windec corners on Oxygen. Luckily Lucas Murray had the patience to listen to me and actually something was started.
Basically we can now provide custom shadows for kwin and that includes active shadow and inactive shadow. The big bonus we got was that we can now ship shadows that include our corners without the aliasing problems. Casper Boemann endured me all weekend long moaning about pixels so we could get this results...


I Must say I'm extremely happy with the results it seemed like something impossible to get just a a few months ago.

On another front we managed to get rid of the not so pretty scrollbars we had thanks to the fantastic and amazingly fast work of Huynh Huu Long.

This is the result....
Its a fantastic experience working with such a wonderful group of people that can get toguether and produce real visible improvement.

Next week, is Plasma working week and huge improvements are already going on there so kde 4.1 was great but 4.2 will definitely ROCK!!!

Comments

Anonymous said…
Well worth the thousands upon thousands of lines of code and the weeks upon weeks to write it.

KDE is looking much better now. :)
Anonymous said…
I really like that the primary window has the visual cue of a colored shadow/glow.

Great work everyone.

-Wade
Anonymous said…
Cool! I like this new scrollbars ). And shadow ))).
Anonymous said…
Admirable :) I am really happy what you are creating with Oxygen. Okteta looks twice as good, only due to the style :)

Just curious, as I cannot test shadows due to my hardwired graphics card ;( , what happens for maximized windows? Is there some glowing as well, for consistency?
Anonymous said…
I really love it, I would like to say that in my opinion, this looks better than OS X's theme, although I would like to have the option of making the active window the same style as the inactive window but with a different colour text.
Great job so far, keep up the good work.
Anonymous said…
That looks great :)
Is there any plan for improving the menus style?
phlogiston said…
This looks definitely great!

But does it mean that the old shiny blue scrollbars are gone forever?
Anonymous said…
There's something to the new scrollbars that makes them uncomfortable to work with: they're not as wide as the old ones. This makes aiming at them messy.
PP said…
4.2 rocks and 4.3 is more awesome!
Haha
Cool shadows. And yeah, I hated that scrollbar really, this is just more consistent.
Anonymous said…
This is great!!

I saw your earlier concepts of the "blue" shadow.. it was very bright; but in today's screenshot it is much more subtle and non-intrusive! Bravo!!

And the new scrollbars are wonderful. I kinda thought the shiny blue bars were kinda Macish and relatively corny compared to the whole elegance of the Oxygen style .. but the new scrollbars are even more elegant!!

Great Job Pinheiro, plasma devs and kwin devs!!
Anonymous said…
awesome! i didn't believe, but you made my dream come true.

big thanks to everyone!
ähm... said…
@anonymous4: The width hasn't changed at all, it's still 15 pixels. You can also move the handle by dragging the glow.
Anonymous said…
So I can still use the old regular shadow? To me it just looks funny ;)
Anonymous said…
The blue shadow is really cool. And the scrollbars look great.
Are there any plans to reintreduce the tabbar from the beta versions of KDE 4.0?
I liked the contrast between the active tab and the inactive and the difference between the black tabbar and the rest of the window.

You are doing a really great job, especially the icons are awnsome!!
Anonymous said…
You guys are doing an amazing job!

We all love you!
Dread Knight said…
Fuckingawesome!
Anonymous said…
I like the new shadows. But to be honest I prefer "old" curved scrollbars. That said, it's nice that new ones are not so bright
Anonymous said…
Thanks for working on this, and thanks for writing a post to let non-developer folks like myself know about it! Those jagged corners were an distracting scar on an otherwise very attractive desktop.

That's not to say that there still isn't room for improvement in other areas (I like the look of those new scrollbars better than the old ones), but that little corner fix is breath of fresh air. Thanks.
Anonymous said…
To every one.
This work is far from done today we have fixed this, tomorow its a new thing....
in fact wen its done ist time to start a new thing...

This is the adgantage/problem of OSS.
@luke note taken...
@anonimous menus shoulg get beter aswell with this patch
@anonimous not sure this shadows will be defoult let alone criple yur need for the other ones.
@ phlogiston I'm afraid so... they were out of style and wre the remains of a rather poor idea I had..
Anonymous said…
Glad to see the Mac-like scroll bars going away. The other Oxygen widgets have 'moving' elements which are a lighter color than the background to indicate they can be manipulated, but the scroll bar sliders were darker. I always thought it would make more sense to use the dark blue for the scroll bar channel and have a button-like look for the slider.
Vladislav said…
I'm sad too see the old scrollbars go :( They were one of my favorite things about oxygen. especially when I made them green :)

but, i trust the oxygen team knows what it is doing. keep up the awesome job!
Anonymous said…
Please don't hate me, but from an interface standpoint, and I haven't used them yet, are the new sliders a step backward in usability? The old ones definitely stand out more, that's just it, they are easy to locate and grab at a glance.
The slightly bevel-y, metallic-y look of the new sliders is very slick.
I think I'd like to see window theme use that, I think it might compliment the rest of the deep-rich-coloured-slightly-glossy look of the desktop, more than the flat gray currently used.
That's just my opinion though.
I'd agree though, that the old sliders could be toned down and given a little more consistency though.
Any way though, Oxygen is beautiful.
Anonymous said…
Hello,

This is GREAT! Much better scrollbars really. Those blue ones where not that great and I always thought they didn't fit with the rest of Oxygen.

The blue shadow is cool for clarity and constistent with the blue edge on a selected text box.

Very good work, thanks!
Anonymous said…
@jamms: have you ever used KDE 4.1? I say this because the scroll handles only glow blue when hovered... normally they are already grey (not like in osx)
nitrofurano said…
Well, i'm very curious to see a window manager based on QT can face LXDE (which one is based on GTK) - would be this possible? here goes an awesome challenge for QT coders! =)
Anonymous said…
The new scrollbar design is kinda fascinating to me - I don't like what I see at all; it just feels wrong.
Anonymous said…
Great! :D
Anonymous said…
@ vide: Yes I use it, and love it. I don't think I said that the sliders always glowed that blue-ish colour.
It does have a satiny texture that is not echoed elsewhere in the interface; iirc.
Oxygen, in my opinion, is the most attractive, if perhaps not most consistent(yet), visual style present in a modern operating system.
Anonymous said…
I don't really like the new scroolbar, as it is really hard for me to distinguish whether it is "activated" or not. That small blue frame is not enough for me.

mat69
Kelvie Wong said…
Wow, I just compiled the latest tip of SVN, and I must say, I am impressed by this. That is a really nice looking shadow.
Anonymous said…
Thanks alot :P
Ivo Anjo said…
Eu sempre gostei de usar sombras azuis semelhantes a essas, mas agora estão ainda melhor :)
Anonymous said…
AWESOME IS TOO LITTLE TO DESCRIBE ALL THE WORK YOU GUYS ARE DOING!!!

Keep up the great work =D

You guys are so great that even M$ is copying you now for Windows 7 :P

http://darktears.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/aaron-tell-the-truth/
Anonymous said…
nothing to do with your post:

the icon for ms-word files is missing. I only have a question mark. thats rather annoying because all my clients send me word-files and i have allways those strange question marks. Can you change this for kde 4.2?

thank you, i love you artwork!!!!
Anonymous said…
@ the icon for ms-word files is missing

that was a bug. Its fixed now the mime was made in the very beguining.
Anonymous said…
@ that was a bug. Its fixed now the mime was made in the very beguining.

great, thank you.

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