KDE 3.5.1: Back to normal

That's it. I did my (second) upgrade to KDE 3.5.1. Everything is working fine except that very obvious "feature": The icons on the desktop. I think that some patch was applied. The icons aren't exactly on the same place than with KDE 3.5.0... but alas my auto-hide panels keep on pushing the icons toward the center of the screen. That's... errr... irritating but not so important.

After a week with KDE 3.5.1, I can say that I haven't seen any obvious bug. Stability is the same than with KDE 3.5.0: No problemo. I'm however a little disappointed since there isn't any visible improvement and Konqueror still doesn't allow me to blog on Blogger. That's what annoys me the most. Firefox 1.5.1 doesn't get any faster to start and its style breaks the consistency of KDE. Well, it doesn't matter much since that broken entry form of Blogger prevents me from using Firefox spellchecker. Konqueror wouldn't do much more apart from starting waaaaaay faster than Firefox.

In the mean time, I took a big decision: The last tab design is the one. I kinda made a loop on this subject. One of my very first designs had vertical separators in between the tabs. The vertical separators are back! Tabs may look indistinguishable with spaces in their label and the separators add some sort of visual aid to aim a tab. The mouseover effect isn't enough.

(Well, Blogger's image handling is pathetic. There's no way to add an image without an uglyly resized thumbnail. So...)

The new tabs are visible here and the mouseover effect is visible here and here. (The selectable mouseover color is green #00D000 and the colorscheme is "Lost Island".)

I also managed to create a nineth colorscheme for my style. Once again, I gave them --How would I say?-- suggesting names that should tell you which colors are used without telling their names. (The links will show you the KStyle dialog using the corresponding colorscheme. Each image is around 50-55 KB.)

• Aerial Blue
  
• Brown Dwarf
• Lost Island
• Lotus Flower
• Mare Serenitatis
• Outer Space
• Snow Fields
• Spring Leaves
• Wooden Cabin

As you can see (again), my style (really) has no problem with white text on dark background. All widgets remain visible whatever the colors. I spent a lot of time playing with "inverted" colorschemes to be sure of that.

One thing that I learned in the process is that a style should not play with .light() and .dark() but rather melt contrasting colors to obtain the same effect. For example, the background and foreground colors always contrast. When you melt them, that gives you a whole range of colors that can be more or less visible depending on the percentages used in the mix. That's what Serenity does. All used colors are always a mix of some background with a foreground so that it doesn't matter if you invert the color. The level of contrast will still remain the same. And when something needs to be highlighted, Serenity adds a percentage of the highlighted text background, and eventually uses the highlighted text color when required to keep the contrast. The most used "sub-routine" in my style is the one to blend two colors.

I don't want to give lessons to style developers but when I see the number of styles that can't cope with a dark background, maybe I should. ;-) (I'm not that serious...)

Well, to finish my post of today, a little bug that just happened. I launched Kopete from my Kicker docker-like panel. KWallet showed its dialog to ask me its password... but forgot to take the focus! So I typed my password in clear in the middle of my blog. Luckily, nothing happened when I pressed Return.

(Control Center... Search... focus...)

My focus stealing prevention level is "Normal". So... (Grumble, grumble.) ;-)