garthecho wrote:One more with new button icons. This one moves away from the Oxygen look.




Mouse over highlights

I love this design, it would be good to bring the default KDE 5.

oskar wrote:I love this design, it would be good to bring the default KDE KDE 5.

That theme is my favorite as well. However, with QML we may have more opportunities than with Aurorae, that's why Andrew wanted to start a thread for the collaborative creation of a QML-based window decoration theme.

QML-based? So that would be this one then?

Choosing from these themes, I'm torn between Next Blue and Next Black for the winner. Both make the window controls stand out clearly (but increasing the line width on the pictograms might be helpful), and the top blue/black line feels like the right amount of highlighting - full blue/black-framed windows look more like some fancy postcard to me. Just not sure about black vs. blue.
Last and most serious point: Light-blue text on a light gray background is pretty awful to read. I don't really see what's wrong with black in this case.

Now, about title bar/window separation - move the blue line from the top edge of the window to the bottom of the title bar? I made a little mockup with black title text and the moved line (not uploaded anywhere yet - no attachments possible here, right?). It looks relatively Android-like, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Hi,

I really love where you guys are going with KDE's future design. I was wondering if someone could post the color scheme used by the new window decoration style ? This one : http://kde-look.org/CONTENT/content-pre1/164722-1.png

Thanks in advance and keep up the good work !

qwach wrote:QML-based? So that would be this one then?

Not exactly, they would just share the same underlying technology (QML) and the same design direction, of course

What about something like this? This is a mock up I am working on currently.

I want to create a window border that works well with the new Qt Quick UI. It is a bit inspired by ChromeOS.

So, I thought I'd share a quick update on the window decorations.

I had been working to prep a candidate design to start a more formal community design cycle. I confess, it has been pretty damn tough to nail something down. BUT, there were so many great ideas here that I was motivated to just keep pushing. I had so many browser tabs open, many with the pages from this thread. Everyone's willingness to share their thoughts and ideas here has helped finally break through the log jam. A special massive shout-out to garthecho's kick-ass creativity (more to come on this btw).

Here's the even better news: Because the feedback here has been so incredibly helpful, instead of just a candidate design, we're closer to a final design than I originally imagined.

Yeah, yeah, ENOUGH WITH TEH WORDS! I hear you say. Fine, here are the pixels:


Here's a quick old-school(svg) Aurorae theme for it (only min, max and close buttons): http://goo.gl/Qcb8MT. To download, click File > Download

There will still be a few changes (design for the window tab feature, more button designs, etc.) so while it's close, don't consider this truly, absolutely final. Of course, feel free to continue sharing ideas here.

(If anyone is interested in the implementation plan, the final design will be implemented in QML for a first OPT-IN release, likely after the first release of Plasma Next, and then ported to C++ when it is decided that it is ready to be used as the default.)

Beautiful design!!!

One thing tho, have you thought about hiding/removing the circle behind the close button on the unactive window? It could be a visual indicator to which window is active/unactive other than the lighter shading.

u251 wrote:Beautiful design!!!

One thing tho, have you thought about hiding/removing the circle behind the close button on the unactive window? It could be a visual indicator to which window is active/unactive other than the lighter shading.

Good feedback, thanks u251.

In use, the blue highlight on the titlebar is only present on the active window (similar to the taskbar in the plasma theme). A shape change, similar to what you suggest might be a useful additional hint to distinguish between active and inactive window.

Wow, very nice! I love it!

alake wrote:

u251 wrote:Beautiful design!!!

One thing tho, have you thought about hiding/removing the circle behind the close button on the unactive window? It could be a visual indicator to which window is active/unactive other than the lighter shading.

Good feedback, thanks u251.

In use, the blue highlight on the titlebar is only present on the active window (similar to the taskbar in the plasma theme). A shape change, similar to what you suggest might be a useful additional hint to distinguish between active and inactive window.

Thanks, long time reader, first time commenter.

Its just the blue highlight is to subtle imo. Plus depending on how customizable it is in terms of color? some colors may not have enough contrast. The shape change is an immediate and obvious indicator to a difference bewtween the 2 windows.

It looks really good alake!

Some points:

1. Is it intended behaviour for the blue line to disappear on focused maximised windows?
2. There seems to be bug with the window shadow, at least on my system. The shadow is is drawn normally on the left/right/bottom of the window, but on the top is it almost unnoticeable/non-existent. I think that looks rather strange.
3. I think the highlighting colour of the minimise/maximise button should be different when hovering. Currently it's grey-ish and has very little contrast compared to the close button. Maybe you could use a different colour or alternatively make the symbols black. In my mind it would then look like the close button when not hovered.

EDIT:
I tried to tinker around a bit but I ran into a very strange problem: My aurorae themes do not update. No matter what I change, the changes do not apply.
If I e.g. change the colour of the close button in Inkscape to green and reload the theme it will still be red. Same after logout and rebooting. The only thing that seems to work is to move the theme out of aurorae's theme directory, reboot and then move it back into the theme directory. Does this happen only to me? It makes developing quite an adventure.

You're not alone Sogatori. This is because of the way KDE caches the theme elements. My very inelegant workaround is to rename the folder and rc file.

garthecho wrote:You're not alone Sogatori. This is because of the way KDE caches the theme elements. My very inelegant workaround is to rename the folder and rc file.

That's unfortunate Another thing I noticed is that I have to come up with a new name every time. If I use a name twice Plasma won't load my changes :s. I guess I have to ask some developer later if there's a way to delete the theme cache.

While I don't know specifically about Plasma Next and other KF5 based software, at least for the KDE 4.x series, deleting the plasma* files in /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER/ outside of KDE was usually sufficient to clear the cache.