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

It shoud be from the...

[acxr is wasted]

save-it-for-a-slow-news-day dept.

Save the eye candy

[legcramp]

I think the Linux community should stop trying to emulate the bloat of XP. What are they smoking? The point of Linux is to be alternative. And if the alternative is the same, looks the same, and takes the same amount of memory to run. Then whats the point? Arg.

Re:Save the eye candy

[yobbo]

It's free.

Re:Save the eye candy

[kenthorvath]

And if the alternative is the same, looks the same, and takes the same amount of memory to run. Then whats the point?

The point is that the alternative isn't the same - it's not proprietary, it's source is open, there are no licensing fees, the community spirit of the developers is reflected in 98% of all software developed for it (iow, it's also open and free). There is an alternative, and it is better.

Even if there was a 100% compatible open sourced version of WindowsXP that had no licensing cost, which would you use? Now imagine if the "freeXP" had no anti-aliasing, onlyh ran in 8-bit color mode, and looked like Windows 3.1, would you still rather use that than the real McCoy? Emulation of an already successful product is not a bad thing, in many ways GTK has already surpassed MFC, now they are filling in the holes.

Re:Save the eye candy

[Speare]

To some people, "alternative" means:

not spending their money for Microsoft,

not being vulnerable to viruses made for the mainstream platform,

has source code available so you can tinker or learn,

has public bug reporting so bugs you discover have a chance at being fixed,

experiment more openly with Human-Computer Interface concepts.

Some people like the look and feel of XP (though I don't). Some people like the product but despise the creator. Some people want to recreate effects they've seen in code, because they wonder if they can reverse-engineer it accurately.

I saw this and wondered, "what if the mouse pointer were the light source for GUI shadows hanging off menus and window frames; would it be horribly distracting or helpful for tracking the mouse pointer intuitively?" I value experimentation over one-size-fits-all, so that's one reason I choose Linux.

Re:Save the eye candy

[kasperd]

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.

Re:Save the eye candy

[93 Escort Wagon]

> I saw this and wondered, "what if the mouse pointer were the light source for GUI shadows
> hanging off menus and window frames; would it be horribly distracting or helpful for tracking the
> mouse pointer intuitively?"

E-17 had a demo that did exactly this. It looked really cool, and probably would be horribly distracting. I can imagine opening up a menu but then forgetting what you were planning to run because you'd get too caught up in playing with the dynamic shadow effect.

Of course we're talking E-17, so there's no danger of this actually happening in real life.

Slow news day?

[m00nun1t]

If this was a post about Windows getting shadows, there'd be dozens of posts listing the zillion OSes that already have shadows and bitching about Microsoft's lack of innovation.

When GTK2 gets it, it's cool.

Such is life.

Re:Slow news day?

[Tony Hoyle]

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

Old news... yawn.

Re:Slow news day?

[13Echo]

This *is* old news. However, this was implemented as a GTK patch sometime last year, about the same time that it got into KDE 3. Of course, maybe this is officially *stable* now, because I wasn't too pleased with the results when this was first implemented.

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

[gantrep]

You know way too much. I am reporting you to Total Information Awareness.

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:Bengali script

[frodo from middle ea]

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.

More than visual fluff

[puckhead]

Shadows provide a visual clue that should speed up the users analysis of what's happening on the desktop. This isn't earth shattering news but is an improvement.

Re:More than visual fluff

[suntse]

Yes, I never "knew what was happening" when I pulled down a menu before. Now, with the help of shadows, I finally understand what's happening when I click on the pull down menu.

Great!

[wfberg]

Now everybody who uses a mac will switch over immediately!

stay tuned...

[houseofmore]

rpm -i ms-paperclip-1XP.rpm

Re:stay tuned...

[spydir31]

seen Vigor?

Wow, must be a slow day

[brunes69]

GTK gets another feature that KDE has had for over a year. Wait itll they get window shadows in 2005. Will that also make the front page?

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.

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.

Re:Huh?

[linuxci]

Phoenix (now renamed Mozilla Firebird) uses its own menus (defined in XUL) rather than using the native menus of GTK or any other Linux toolkit. Changing to a different theme will get rid of the shadows if the theme in question doesn't use shadows. You can download new themes from Mozilla Firebird Help

The only OS where Mozilla based XUL apps use native menus is on Mac OS because on the Mac the menus are displayed at the top of the screen not at the top of the application like they are in Windows and Linux apps.

Hmmmm, might be bad.

[Krapangor]

My experience with shadow dropping menus is that the overall usuabily and visual quality degenerates. The underlying text structures are worse to read and after 16 hours in front of the screen your eyes start to hurt. And it seems to me that it reduces the menu contrast, which I personally don't like, too.
It's rather strange that people always want to add this feature. In real live you wouldn't read a news paper in blinding sunlight just to see the pages drop a shadow, would you ?

Re:Hmmmm, might be bad.

[archen]

After 16 yours you should be taking a break anyway. The amount of eye strain you are probably experiencing is likely hurting your vision. I somehow doubt you look away from the screen every 15 minutes or so like your supposed to either (but who does that anyway? :) . I don't really see how this would make things that much harder to see than say, making an application look "3d" instead of strait black lines.

I think if there is any tragedy in Linux eyestrain it's anti-aliasing fonts, where I get the choice of: 1) looks like an ass (normal) 2) looks like a blurry mess (aliased).

Re:Hmmmm, might be bad.

[cowbutt]

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.

--

QT had shadows last year

[salimfadhley]

KDE had shadowed windows and menus a long time ago (at least it did on my distribution) - shouldnt the title of this article read

"GTK/Gnome finally catches up by implementing usless feature copied from OSX"

Yes, shadows are nice - they stop windows smelging into each other... but this is so NOT NEWS.

Re:QT had shadows last year

[mcgroarty]

"GTK/Gnome finally catches up by implementing usless feature copied from OSX"

Yes, shadows are nice - they stop windows smelging into each other... but this is so NOT NEWS.

Windows had it before the Mac, there was a hack to do it with Amiga Workbench before that, and it was in countless Hollywood computer displays before that, etc.

It's a slow news day, this does look kind of cool, and there are going to be people who enjoy it. Meanwhile, you spent an order of magnitude longer in complaining about the article than you would have in just skipping past, so -- what's your point?

I'm not so sure...

[nepheles]

It might be of more benefit to everyone if the GTK people focussed instead on overall useability, which is lacking in many places. Once the interface is as refined as, say, that of OS X, we can concentrate on the eye-candy.

One and for ALL!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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!!!

Linux XP

[bazik]

One more step towards Linux XP ;)

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.
  

Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe someday they will actually have a usable file selector dialog as well.

Yes I know its not fair to point out one little thing someone worked on and complain why X wasn't done first, but really there are certain things that REALLY need to get done first.

Like how the Gnome project continues to not fix the basic flaws in Nautilus. I mean really this thing does everything but manage files well. They keep adding more and more eyecandy and yet when you do something basic like browse a remotely mounted directory Nautilues chokes bigtime. I simply don't have all day to wait while Nautilus "thinks" before displays my files.(yes preview etc is turned off).

It seems like the Gnome project is getting ahead of itself without fixing basic flaws that should have been fixed by version 1.0.

And No I'm not Trolling. I'm a fulltime Gnome user, have been since 2.0. Coming from KDE the unpolished parts I've mentioned really stand out though.

Great, another GTK appearance option (long).

[aussersterne]

Is there anywhere out there a configuration applet for GTK2? You know, something to configure the colors and fonts and manage odd things like drop shadows for menus without having to choose somebody else's idea of a nice desktop in a pre-built theme?

As a longtime KDE user, I'm used to just popping up the control center and configuring such things. KDE has always somehow taken care of the GTK applications' appearances as well. Some recent GTK2 applications, however (i.e. Ximan Evolution) began ignoring KDE's configuration. I got rather tired of seeing these sticking out like a sore thumb on my desktop and decided it was time to configure them to match my colors and fonts using a native GTK tool, instead of "cheating" by using KDE to configure my GTK applications.

Ummmm, where to start, that was the question.

I couldn't find anything but the theme selector in Red Hat 9's GNOME desktop. That let me choose other people's ideas of a nice desktop, but not my own. I tried the old "gnomecc" tool from the command line, but it wasn't there. Finally using an strace I figured out that the appearance of gtk was controlled in .gtkrc.mine and .gtkrc-2.0.mine. Great! Apparently this is how KDE controls the appearance of GTK applications -- it edits these files for me. But now some applications are not getting the hint properly. Okay, I'll edit the files by hand, no problem. I looked at the existing files... Not so great. Not intuitive.

Color format looks like the odd (0-1,0-1,0-1) tuple used by some GTK apps (notably The GIMP) in alternate color palette dialogs. I start up the GIMP and start trying to construct matching colors using that format, and then inserting them into .gtkrc-2.0.mine. After changing a few of the color options by trial and error, more gtk2 widgets do indeed match my KDE colors. Unfortunately, many do not, and the font still sucks.

Since there's nothing helpful in the .gtkrc and .gtkrc-2.0 files themselves, I start looking around for documentation. Back in the old days, X Resources for dotfiles were always documented in application manual pages. Maybe GTK apps do the same thing?

No dice.

So I get on to Google Groups and start looking. I find references to a file at gtk.org. Pretty soon I am digging through this little gem at developer.gnome.org, among others.

I couldn't believe that changing the appearance for a few GTK applications was orders of magnitude more complex and user-unfriendly than editing my old .Xdefaults or .XResources files had been. After another hour or so of studying, and some more trial-and-error, I was finally able to get my GTK2 applications to completely match my simple KDE colors and fonts -- which had taken me all of two minutes to select when I chose them way back in the KDE2 days and which I've been using ever since.

So... now we have GTK2 drop-shadows... Who the hell will ever figure out how to turn them on? Before we add yet more GTK2 appearance options, wouldn't it be prudent to get an application into GNOME to configure them all? Is there already one (other than KDE control center, which doesn't yet seem to completely work with GTK2) and I've just missed it?

In any case, for a while after Red Hat 9 came out I wondered if there was any real reason I was using KDE over GNOME... This episode gave me my answer!

Re:Great, another GTK appearance option (long).

[IamTheRealMike]

Somebody was working on a colour theme control applet for Gnome2, but I haven't heard anything about it for a while.

There isn't really great demand for it. If you want consistancy in your desktop, you're already using BlueCurve/Galaxy/Geramik etc, which do colours for you.

Setting GTKs colours, themes, fonts and so on should be done via XSETTINGS. Unfortunately the lack of a standardised colour format prevents this from happening currently, believe me, I'd like it too as then Wine and KDE could sync to *my* colours. But it's not done yet. Volunteers, as ever, are welcome.

Re:That's the point I was making.

[Nutcase]

Nothing wrong with ignorance. It's the default state of knowledge for everyone on just about every topic.

The thing you should get upset about is willful ignorance. Choosing, and indeed working, to remain ignorant is unforgivable. Doubly so when that ignorance creates intolerance of others.

yeah, great, thanks

[CySurflex]

Great- you just made me notice that my Windows XP menus has shadows. I don't know how long its been there, but now it's disturbing me and I want the shadow OFF!!! Thanks a lot slashdot.

A Drop Shadows Is a Great UI Cue

[EXTomar]

Drop Shadows are simply a great UI indication of "depth" and "boundry". I wish more UI primatives had it. Given a jumble of rectangles which one is the top most? So far the answer has been to highlight or focus the top one differently than the others (ie. title bar is a different color to stand out from the rest which may not work if your focus is different than your top most). Drop Shadows enhances this distinction since your brain has already been looking for the most contiguous rectange and assuming that is the top most. Sometimes that is hard to spot but things like Drop Shadows can help flag where windows end and at a glance show their stacking order.

Its great that UIs have Drop Shadows but I wonder why they aren't applied to even more primatives? Why don't entire windows have drop shadows?

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.