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Menu Shadows in GTK2

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the why-the-heck-not dept.

unmadindu noted that there is a now a gtk shadow patch which does what it says for GTK2 applications. You can see a screenshot, or another or yet another. And if you're lazy, here are some RPMs with the patch. One more piece of eye candy to brighten up your weekend.

14 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Yes you are dense. And I hope you get modded down.

    There are "shadows" on the right and bottom of the menu - shaded areas giving visual cues to indicate that the menu is on top of the window contents below.

    See them now?

  2. Bengali script by yerricde · · Score: 4, Informative

    The text appears to be written in a Brahmi descended script, namely Bengali. Such scripts are used widely in India and surrounding areas, where the predominant religion is Hinduism rather than Islam.

    --
    Will I retire or break 10K?
    1. Re:Bengali script by The+Cydonian · · Score: 4, Informative
      Hate to point this out buddy, but there are more Bengali Muslims than Bengali Hindus. Think Bangladesh, not just India. :-)

      Great link though, fantastic website that.

      --
      More than mere navel gazing.
    2. Re:Bengali script by frodo+from+middle+ea · · Score: 2, Informative
      Almost correct,
      The script is indeed Bengali, which is the native script of Indian State of West Bengal, and India's neighbouring country Bangladesh.
      The indian state + bangladesh , together were known as Bengal before india's independence. The West Bengal part was predominantly hindu , while the bangladesh part being predominantly Muslims
      At independence The indian sub continent was split in to two countries India, and Pakistan based on religion. The hindu mejority places formed india while the muslim mejority placed formed Pakistan. Pakistan was geographically located on two opposite sides of india, The current Pakistan being west Pakistan and the current Bangladesh being East Pakistan. West and East being in respect to india
      East Pakistanis were always dissatisfied at the treatment they received at the hands of West Pakistan. One Pakistan was dominated by shiya muslims and another was sunni muslims. Thats like catholics and protenstants , but with even more hate for each other.

      So East Pakistan went to war with West Pakistan in 1971/72 for their independance. It was never strategically convenient for india to have two pakistans on either side, so india helped east pakistan in the war. Thus was born banglaesh.
      Now both west bengal (mostly hindus) and bangladesh (muslims) have bangali as their official script.

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      for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
  3. Re:Slow news day? by Tony+Hoyle · · Score: 4, Informative

    Especially since it's been in KDE since v3 :)

    Old news... yawn.

  4. One and for ALL!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    KDE == Window Manager

    GTK == GUI tool kit

    you may consider comparing QT with GTK instead of "KDE with GTK"

    WOW! If this isn't insightful!!!

  5. Re:Wow, must be a slow day by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 3, Informative
    That's not going to happen for some time. This GTK patch won't be going into the mainstream releases most likely, it was purely a wet-afternoon hack (it's been around for a while btw).

    Proper non-sucky transparency requires support from XFree, which doesn't exist yet. Until then both this unofficial patch and the broken support KDE ships with will just be a quick hack.

  6. Comments by big.ears · · Score: 5, Informative
    • This patch has been around for months. The latest bugfix release was two weeks ago. This didn't just happen, and I'm surprised to read it here as news.
    • For those of you who are waiting to get it into your distro, don't hold your breath. It is a self-proclaimed ugly hack that works reasonably well but will not be part of the main GTK. But, a similar hack is used for QT/KDE, which gives you an idea of where GTK hackers priorities are. You'll have to wait until true alpha transparency makes it into X for this done right.
    • Despite the many comments about this just being eye-candy, this probably benefits usability as well (like Anti-Aliasing). Shadow is an important depth cue, which helps segregate the menu from the background. This probably makes it slightly easier and faster to find the proper menu item (tens or hundreds of ms), which over a lifetime or across an organization can add up to some real money.
  7. Re:Wow, must be a slow day by windi · · Score: 3, Informative

    GTK has nothing to do with window shadows, the WM does them.

    GTK is a GUI API only. If you want window shadows in GNOME (the desktop environment that uses the GTK API), you need a WM that supports them, so suggest window shadows to the sawfish and the metacity teams, since those two are the WM's most commonly used with GNOME.

  8. Re:Save the eye candy by kasperd · · Score: 2, Informative

    Plus, why is it a patch? Shouldn't things like this be designed-in?

    Seems you don't know what a patch means in the open source community. A patch is simply a listning of the source lines differing in the old and the new version. There is a program called patch, which will then perform the changes. This is often a more space efficient way to distribute small changes, and it is also often a good way to merge different changes.

    --

    Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
  9. XD2 issues by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Be careful installing this if you're running XD2. I installed the RPMS on the page and then restarted X to find gdm complaining that my gdmgreeter theme file was corrupt....

    After a few hours trying to fix my config files, i just went to ftp.ximian.com and got the older copy of gtk (2.2.2-0) and did an rpm -U --force to have it overwrite this 'prettier' version

    hope someone else finds this useful

    1. Re:XD2 issues by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      I had the same issue with my Mandrake Box. U basically need to install the RH 9.0 RPMS for glib2, gdk-pixbuf and libpng as well....

  10. Quit Trolling by erikharrison · · Score: 5, Informative

    You know, at this point it's probably not worth posting this, but . . .

    For all of you trolling out there about how GNOME should get off it's ass and fix this or that before resorting to implementing this sort of eye candy, or for those of you trolling that KDE had this first, a couple of facts:

    • This was not done by a GNOME developer, or is in any way part of the GNOME project. This was done by Olivier Fourdan, the head developer of the second most popular GTK+ based desktop environment, XFce [1].
    • Drop shadows in X11 are a hack, Qt or GTK+. Hack, hack, hack. No alpha blending.
    • Olivier know's it's a hack. And that is why he did it. It was fun. It was a side trek from his over a year of work on the GTK+ 2 rewrite of XFce. It will not be a part of the standard GTK+. It does class up my desktop however, so I like it.

    -Erik

    [1] Yes, there are DE's other than GNOME or KDE. XFce (xfce.org) is currently finishing up it's GTK+ 2 development branch, XFce4 (it's in BETA 2). ROX (rox.sf.net) just finished it's GTK+ 2 branch. Wanna good winning combo, to have the best of 3 worlds? Take GNOME, replace Metacity with XFce4's window manager (xfwm), replace Nautilus with ROX's file manager (ROX-Filer), and be amazed.

  11. Re:Hmmmm, might be bad. by cowbutt · · Score: 2, Informative
    Sounds like you need to either try some better fonts (The Bitstream Vera series are good) and/or recompile Freetype with the bytecode interpreter enabled. Most distros ship with the code disabled as it may have patent liabilities.

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