Menu Shadows in GTK2

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.

Comments

Bengali script

[yerricde]

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.

Re:Bengali script

[The Cydonian]

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.

Re:Slow news day?

[Tony Hoyle]

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

Old news... yawn.

Re:Wow, must be a slow day

[IamTheRealMike]

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.

Comments

[big.ears]

• 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.
  

Re:Wow, must be a slow day

[windi]

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.

Quit Trolling

[erikharrison]

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.