Craig Drummond has released a new theme and "engine" for GTK programs that provides something many people have been looking for: a common look and feel for KDE and GNOME applications. While Red Hat's Blue Curve attempts to do something similar, Mr. Drummond's Geramik is the first theme implementation to provide smooth integration between environments.
As MacOS X, and arguably, GNOME, have shown, many people love photorealistic icons despite the theoretical trade-offs with usability. So if you've ever wondered about the philosophy behind KDE's default icons, you might want to read Torsten Rahn's recent article on the matter.
Many in the KDE community are aware of some rocky history between
KDE hacker Mosfet and other KDE developers.
Fortunately, it looks like things have taken a great turn for the better:
Mosfet wrote in to tell us that "I've decided to donate 20 effects I ported to KDE/Qt
for PixiePlus to KDE3".
Waldo Bastian promptly
Are you looking for icons, backgrounds, color schemes, window decorations, system sounds, or
Mosfet took the pre- and circa- KDE2 world by storm not so long ago. His fingerprints are all over many of the styles, themes, window decorations as well as much of the KDE2 we are familiar with today. He churned out thousands of lines of code accompanied by slick screenshot after slick screenshot.
Last week, we posted a story on a theme tutorial sponsored by IBM developerWorks. The tutorial was targeted at non-programmers who wish to theme window decorations, icons, sounds, colors, etc.
Many of you have been waiting for this one. Carsten Pfeiffer wrote in to tell us about the first release of KuickShow since KDE 1.1.2 in July 1999. KuickShow is a nice image viewer based on Rasterman's Imlib, and in case you don't remember, the killer feature of KuickShow was its blazing speed.
For the last couple days, I've been working on making things transparent in KDE. This is pretty easy to do, but time consuming. Most notable success so far is with Konqueror. Next up, ksirc, and hopefully kicker. This code cannot go into 2.1, since we are in a feature freeze, but the following version of KDE should be quite transparent! [Ed: Also check out the transparency screenshots for Kasbar TNG.
Have you noticed that kde.themes.org has not been as active as everything else in the kde world? Apparently, they need some help to maintain the site. If you have "intimate knowledge of the KDE theme system" then you may be the person for the job. If you're interested, email cjr and ElCoronel.
John Califf wrote in to tell us that, "Krayon (also known as Kimageshop) is alive and well and under active development now." Read below about the status of this important KOffice component. Has anyone used it lately? What features are most important to add/get working before Krayon is distributed with KOffice?
