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.

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.

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!

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 ?

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:Bengali script

[gantrep]

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

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.

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:stay tuned...

[spydir31]

seen Vigor?

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.