I've got a small question about the look and feel of KDE4. Is it planned to integrate ARGB support in window styles in the future ? I do not mean simple compositing, which renders background and foreground the same way (you cannot have a translucid background with readable text for instance), but real levels of transparency in some parts of the widgets themselves, including the mainwindow background.

And here come my second questions ; is there anything planned to easy the creation of window styles and window decorations? I can see a lot of new Compiz Fusion themes on KDE-Look every day, but almost nothing new for KDE. I guess this is due to the difficulty of creating new themes. Anything planned for that ?

Applications can use ARGB windows whenever they want, Qt apps require a small hack (See Plasma panel code) but they can do it as well. ARGB support will not be added to KWin decorations until Qt officially supports ARGB though.

For window decorations I plan to create an official SVG-based decoration for 4.3, meaning it will be possible for anyone with SVG experience to create a decoration without needing to write a single line of code. Currently the only other way to do it right now is be using the deKorator decoration (No idea if it's still being developed or not though).

Cheers for the quick reply. Can't wait for both of those to happen. If I remember correctly, Qt4.5 should start with ARGB. And for the decoration, good luck mate ! Dekorator has been ported to KDE4, but not by its maintainer, so I guess it's over for it. But think about adding blur options for translucent areas in your decoration Ho, by the way, any plan to create a completely themable window style ? that would be a great addition to window decoration.

Well, let's hope that KDE4 will make it easy to customize the appearence of it and extend the styles/decorations library.

Zarin wrote:For window decorations I plan to create an official SVG-based decoration for 4.3, meaning it will be possible for anyone with SVG experience to create a decoration without needing to write a single line of code. Currently the only other way to do it right now is be using the deKorator decoration (No idea if it's still being developed or not though).

:thumbs_up:
I can not wait till 4.3 !!

Zarin wrote:...
For window decorations I plan to create an official SVG-based decoration for 4.3...

Are you the creator of cokoon ?

As far as I know, cokoon (untouched on playground since 1 year) can create styles for qt widgets directly from svg files. Seriously you should take a look on it.

Cheers!

Zarin wrote:Applications can use ARGB windows whenever they want, Qt apps require a small hack (See Plasma panel code) but they can do it as well. ARGB support will not be added to KWin decorations until Qt officially supports ARGB though.

It seems I was wrong about this. After some discussion with the Compiz devs and the rest of the KWin team there is a high chance that we will have ARGB decorations in KDE 4.3.

xbullethammer wrote:Are you the creator of cokoon ?

As far as I know, cokoon (untouched on playground since 1 year) can create styles for qt widgets directly from svg files. Seriously you should take a look on it.

Cheers!

I will look into it, thanks for pointing it out.

Cypher wrote:[...] (you cannot have a translucid background with readable text for instance), but real levels of transparency in some parts of the widgets themselves, including the mainwindow background.

Konsole actually has this already. Its background can be set to translucent, but the text on top of it stays fully opaque.

Cypher wrote:Dekorator has been ported to KDE4, but not by its maintainer, so I guess it's over for it.

I removed Qt3Support dependency last week, so it is not dead. If you have ideas for improvements, let us hear.

@cfeck: glad to hear it !

Well, I might have some ideas, however, I do not know how easy/hard they are, or if they are even possible at all.

For instance :
- Allow transparency in decorations
- Allow SVG's as well as pixmaps
- Intregrate GHNS in the configuration panel to get themes easily
- Erm... more to come when ideas pop in my mind

cfeck wrote:I removed Qt3Support dependency last week, so it is not dead. If you have ideas for improvements, let us hear.

How can I install Dekorator in kde4.1.2 ?

@Zayed, the source is in playground/artwork. If your distribution does not have packages for it, you should file a package request/wish to your distributions bugtracker. For openSUSE 11 and Fedora 9, there are packages on kde-look.org

I just added KNS ("Get New Stuff") support to playground/artwork/dekorator.

Frank (of openDesktop.org fame) was kind enough to add the GNS provider entries to kde-look.org for deKorator themes, and I quickly tested it with some themes.

Unfortunately, many themes are not following the guidelines for archive names or contents, so after installing them, they do not show up in the theme list.

I will improve "broken" theme file detection in the future.

To get the source, use:

Code: Select all

svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/artwork/dekorator


Some testing and feedback is appreciated.

Note: Todays update on kde-look.org only has an important bug fix, but not yet the KNS support.

cfeck wrote:Some testing and feedback is appreciated.

I am uncertain as to whether this is a GHNS bug, a theme bug or a DeKorator one but it seems that out of all the themes that I manage to download with GHNS none of them have a correct shape mask and leave white gaps in the corners and on the sides of windows.

Zarin, go to "Paths" page, and set the "Mask" checkbox, otherwise deKorator ignores the masks path.

While I love dekorator and how easy it makes window decorations to make, I want something similar for styles (PNG based?) !