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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.
save-it-for-a-slow-news-day dept.
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
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.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
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?
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.
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
Now everybody who uses a mac will switch over immediately!
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
rpm -i ms-paperclip-1XP.rpm
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?
It's free.
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 ?
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
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.
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.
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.
[
One more step towards Linux XP ;)
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
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?
.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.
.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.
.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?
.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.
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
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
Since there's nothing helpful in the
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
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!
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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?
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:
-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.