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Re: New features in KDE 3
by reihal on Sunday 09/Sep/2001, @02:12
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It's Kicker, not kpanel, and beauty is only skin-deep.
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Re: New features in KDE 3
by dingodonkey on Sunday 09/Sep/2001, @09:13
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But in a GUI, is it not that skin-deep beauty that is vital?
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Re: New features in KDE 3
by Vindi on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @03:03
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That's like saying:
"Look a my Ferrari, it doesn't have an engine, but it looks great!"
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Re: New features in KDE 3
by john on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @08:11
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but you buy a Ferrari for its appearance, not (only) its engine...
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Re: New features in KDE 3
by Vindi on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @08:16
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but you shouldn't have one without the other, else both are pointless!
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Re: New features in KDE 3
by Joeri Sebrechts on Sunday 09/Sep/2001, @10:23
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They're called themes.
I wouldn't like KDE to look like XP's Luna, or MacOS's Aqua. It needs to at least be original in some way. And might I use this chance to be on-topic to say that I think it's childish how MS made a badly-done copy of the Aqua gui? You should check out XP's gui before they released Luna, and after. Completely different styling. It's not at all that surprising that Luna (just the name is a rip-off) showed up a bit after Aqua.
Besides, I don't even like Luna. I think it's ugly (it doesn't have sheens, which are a core element of the liquid effect).
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Re: New features in KDE 3
by surak on Sunday 09/Sep/2001, @18:48
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But you *can* make KDE look like Luna or Aqua. Well, I don't know about Luna, but Aqua for sure, which is available in several incarnations on kde.themes.org. :)
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Mosfet's Liquid engine
by Michel on Sunday 09/Sep/2001, @20:49
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... or even better than those slow pixmap-based renderings of Aqua at themes.org, go to mosfet.org and download his Liquid style engine :) Luna-style window decoration coupled with Aqua.
Michel
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Re: Mosfet's Liquid engine
by Spark on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @15:44
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I always hated all available KDE styles and themes, but I immidiatly fall in love with Liquid. :)
It does not even compare to every other Aqua or Luna clone I've ever seen. It's so much better! It feels like a "real" and "native" style, not a clone or something.
And it's unbelievable fast.
Here is my desktop:
http://home.wtal.de/borgmann/konqueror.png
Note that the menu on the top is for some weird reason shown BEHIND the menu bar in this shot. Usually it's not so it looks better in reallife. ;)
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Re: Mosfet's Liquid engine
by Sarah Gould on Thursday 13/Sep/2001, @21:04
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Is Mosfet's Liquid Engine like a window manager? Is it like Window Maker (or Sawfish, etc), or a copy of KDE with a new look?
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Re: Mosfet's Liquid engine
by Michel on Thursday 13/Sep/2001, @21:47
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It's a style engine for KDE, Sarah. That means it changes the appearance of Qt and KDE apps for you - just like you can choose to have your KDE desktop look like Mac, Windows or Unix currently.
Basically it consists of:
1. a set of window decoration for KWin, the KDE window manager
2. a style engine to change the appearance of the widgets (buttons, scrollbar etc) of Qt/KDE apps
3. a colour scheme to switch the colours
Pretty amazing stuff! GNOME won't have easily-switchable colour schemes until GNOME 2 next year.
Regards,
Michel
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Re: New features in KDE 3
by Greg on Sunday 09/Sep/2001, @12:14
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You should try Mosfet's High Performance Liquid theme.
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Eye candy =)
by Spark on Sunday 09/Sep/2001, @13:34
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Yes, that's pretty damn cool (I use it currently), but I think he didn't speak about the style that is themable, but about fixed elements like the panel or the startmenu. Or even the login menu...
I would also suggest to work on the desktop/filemanager part.
Some ideas of Nautilus are pretty good. For example the transparent and colored select box when dragging the mouse while mousebutton is held. That's not just very nice to look at, but also easier to the eyes than a thin black line. :)
I also like how Nautilus renders Text below items. Very nice. KDE needs some improvement in this area.
Also missing is transparent moving od icons. I thought that was already implemente? I remember something like that, but can't find it in KDE 2.2. This does not just look nice, but it is VERY usefull to exactly see where you are placing your icon. :)
Something I do NOT like about the current KDE optic is, that it always and everywhere renders thin black lines! What's up with that? For example: I select an icon and click on the desktop to deselect it. Now their is a small black border around the icon... why? To show me that I clicked this last? It just looks ugly.
This also happens to buttons and many other widgets.
Please remove that! :) There is also a lot of weirdness when clicking and moving things. For example, when dragging an item, there are boxes drawn around the item and the text... why? It even lacks behind the actual rendering of the item... very ugly. :) Selected items do not look nice as well, that could be improved.
You see, there is a lot more about eyecandy than GUI-style and window decorations...
Some other ideas: When drawing the menu on top of the screen, can't you (optionally) place a shadow below it like Mac OS X?
Or even better, implement those shadows (optional) for every window and probably even icons?
That would just rock. I know that it would be quite a performance hit, but maybe this would force the lame XFree developers to come out with this alpha blending extension soon!
It would also be great to have real transparent windows (while moving or for backgrounds of some widgets), but I think that would be way to slow without native support by Xfree. :(
It would be great if someone could port Qt and KDE to DirectFB.
I know that people don't want to abandon Xfree, so it would be great if KDE would only depend on Qt, so it could run on every plattform that Qt supports and you could run this either on Xfree or on Linux framebuffer.
Qt/Embedded looks so great... why do our embedded devices have more eye candy than our desktop computers?? :) That's not fair.
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Re: Eye candy =)
by Carbon on Sunday 09/Sep/2001, @18:08
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XFree already has alpha, with the xrender extension. Or am I mistaken?
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Re: Eye candy =)
by Spark on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @06:21
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Has it? I don't think so.
AFAIK transparency tricks like the Liquid menus or the transparent windows while moving in Enlightenment still have to be done by copying the screen to a buffer and using this as the background. :(
That's why this Enlightenment windows always stop for a second before you can move them transparently. This sucks.
Alpha blending could be used for so many things...
X is not really the greatest thing for a desktop.
I would gladly switch to DirectFB for desktop rendering and user X only for 3D games anymore.
echo "exec quake3" > .xinitrc
startx
:)
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Re: Eye candy =)
by Carbon on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @12:37
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Hmm, lack of one eye-candy oriented feature (that's already currently in devel) is hardly reason to switch entirely to FB. FB is good, but X has quite a bit going for it, like network windowing support, and acclerated 2d.
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Re: Eye candy =)
by Greg on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @14:29
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Not really. Xfree really doesn't have that much 3d support, nor hardware 2d. I know this is a complicated thing, you have to implement OpenGL or Mesa to even have and hardware acceleration in Xfree. Still, my video card, an S3 Savage4, that is has hardware accelerated 2d and 3d cannot do hardware acceleration because it is only implemented for 3dFX, Matrox, and NVidia chipsets. What about the rest of us? If I had full hardware accel. support for my board, X and KDE would no doubt run so much faster, but as I don't they are noticeably slower compared to win 98 with hardware accel. support from the manufacturer. Absolutely no 3d games for me until Mesa can fully support my card's chipset.
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Re: Eye candy =)
by Spark on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @15:32
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Accelerated 2D is MUCH better with DirectFB! They even have a DirectFB X-Server, which outperformces XFree in benchmarks. Couldn't try it yet.
XFree has more drivers and better 3D support. Drivers will come and 3D support is not important for the desktop (I could still launch XFree from within the DirectFB desktop for the game).
The network support is something, that many users don't really need. :)
It would be great, if KDE could just run on "Qt" (not Xlibs) and Qt would run natively on DirectFB, so you could choose your environment.
X is really not everybody's taste.
Or their could be something like a "layer" between Qt, the hardware/operating system and KDE, so you just had to port this layer (along Qt) to other plattforms if you want to run KDE on them.
KDE could become a kernel independent operating system, like Qube or Athene. :) That would really rock.
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Re: Eye candy =)
by Carbon on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @19:19
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>KDE could become a kernel independent operating system, like Qube or Athene. :) That would really rock.
Eh, I dunno about that. There's a whole lot more code and work in between a DE and a full OS, and the KDE developers are working hard enough as it is. On the other hand, perhaps a Linux distro dedicated to nothing but KDE (and not a crappy commercial one either, but an open source distro) would be very cool.
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Re: Eye candy =)
by not me on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @10:48
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>For example: I select an icon and click on the desktop to deselect it. Now their is a small black border around the icon... why? To show me that I clicked this last?
No, it's for people who like to use the keyboard. That line indicates where the current focus is so that you can move it around with the keyboard. Win2K has a very nice option that turns off these keyboard hints until you press an arrow key. Yet another option for KDE's overcrowded configuration panels.
>maybe this would force the lame XFree developers to come out with this alpha blending extension soon!
The render extension is already out. That's what gives us the wonderful anti-aliased text. Alpha-blending is already used in various places in KDE. I think with QT3 support for alpha-blending will become more universal, but I'm not sure.
>Qt/Embedded looks so great...
What you aren't seeing in the screenshots is the fact that QT/Embedded is not hardware accelerated, which makes it very slow. QT/Embedded was never meant to replace X for normal usage.
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Re: Eye candy =)
by Spark on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @15:23
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> No, it's for people who like to use the keyboard. That line indicates where the current focus is so that you can move it around with the keyboard. Win2K has a very nice option that turns off these keyboard hints until you press an arrow key. Yet another option for KDE's overcrowded configuration panels.
1) They should look nicer. :)
2) That's a nice idea. Why not just do it by default?
> The render extension is already out. That's what gives us the wonderful anti-aliased text. Alpha-blending is already used in various places in KDE. I think with QT3 support for alpha-blending will become more universal, but I'm not sure.
I know that it's used for Antia Aliasing, but I never saw it used for actual alpha blending of windows or widgets. I don't think this part is out yet.
If it is, why isn't is used? Maybe somebody know?
> What you aren't seeing in the screenshots is the fact that QT/Embedded is not hardware accelerated, which makes it very slow. QT/Embedded was never meant to replace X for normal usage.
Framebuffer IS hardware accelerated (look at DirectFB). And it's very fast.
Of course no 3D yet. :) But I don't need 3D on my desktop (yet). And it wouldn't be a problem to launch X to play Quake or so.
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Re: Eye candy =)
by not me on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @22:59
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The framebuffer is *NOT* hardware accelerated. DirectFB is not the framebuffer. DirectFB is hardware accelerated. DirectFB is a layer on top of the framebuffer that provides an interface to hardware acceleration. DirectFB needs lots of drivers to catch up with XFree.
DirectFB does look like a cool project. Those screenshots are amazing! Especially this one:
http://directfb.org/news/count/videoshot.png
I dearly hope someone ports QT to DirectFB (which is not the same as QT/Embedded running on the framebuffer) so we can enjoy that DirectFB goodness. However, even if KDE was ported to DirectFB, it probably couldn't use any DirectFB specific features because DirectFB only works on Linux and KDE is cross-platform.
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Re: Eye candy =)
by Matthew Gardiner on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @17:02
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In regards to QT embedded, the graphical layers bypasses X and talks directly to the frame buffer (in the kernel), hence the reason the importance of frame buffers in the kernel, thus removing the need to have a top heavy X + QT etc etc.
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Re: New features in KDE 3
by Iuri Fiedoruk on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @10:40
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I think kicker should use some xml skin system like noatun, sonique or winamp3.
This would simply rock! Imagine that you could choose a background for kicker (a png with any format) or even some images for the background, then each item on kicker could be a png in any format...
It's hard to explain it well.
Later I'll post some screenshots and some xml to show what I mean.
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Re: New features in KDE 3
by Iuri Fiedoruk on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @11:08
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Ok, here's the idea:
http://www.protoman.f2s.com/pic01.png (144k, png)
Now let me explain how this theme would be build (I'll supose the background is only one image called blue.png) - this is only a idea, so I'll kick values for posx and posy (position x and position y) for the items. So here's the xml:
<kickertheme>
<kmenu>
<posx>20</posx><posy>112</posy>
<icon>kmenu.png</icon>
</kmenu>
<openapps>
<posx>62</posx><posy>96</posy>
<cols>2</cols><rows>4</rows>
</openapps>
and so goes on for dock, clock, other applets, etc.....
this can be more generic, as instead of a tag for each applet, a generic <applet> tag that receives a applet name.
</kickertheme>
Anyway, this is my idea, what do you think?
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Re: New features in KDE 3
by not me on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @14:41
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I think it is already possible. Kicker can have a backround image already. Kicker's buttons can have "backround tiles" that show up behind the icons. You can change Kicker's icons with an icon theme, and you can change the appearence of the applet handles, buttons, etc. with a regular theme. You wouldn't want to specify the positions of buttons and applets in the theme itself, that is for the user to decide. The only thing that is missing is the XML to tie it together. Currently KDE's themeing capabilities are somewhat widely distributed in different places. You're welcome to invent an XML theme parser for KDE, since no one else has shown a desire to do so (although unified theme support is an often-requested feature).
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Re: New features in KDE 3
by Iuri Fiedoruk on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @15:01
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Yes, the only think that seems to be missing is enabling other formats of kicker other than a rectangle.
This could even be extended to it's applets. Imagine how cool a circle clock or elipsed buttons for open apps.
With this and hability to use kicker as any format, things should be very easy, but I really would like to extend it more to something like Object Desktop.
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Re: New features in KDE 3
by Spark on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @15:38
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I like your ideas.
It would be really need to be able to skin kicker like say... k-jofol. :)
Someone could do a sience fiction kicker, etc...
Look at Athene (www.rocklyte.com) to know what I'm talking about (you can download and install it, it's pretty easy and a nice demo of a fully skinnable desktop! Very impressive).
Of course that's very hard to do, cause you have to provide places for applets, the menu entry's, etc. You can't hardcode them, cause the user could decide to load an unknown applet or something like that.
I don't expect this very soon, but would probably be a nice idea for KDE 4.0 ;)
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Re: New features in KDE 3
by Wulfhere on Friday 14/Sep/2001, @12:07
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Try kde.themes.org for themes and help with making your own. That's the great thing about Free software: If you don't like it, you can fix it! I eagerly await your beautiful new KDE skins!
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