KDE: Just for fun

Last news from Serenityland. Due to another failure from my regular ISP which hosted Serenity's files, I had to find a webspace and I found a good free one. 200MB for Serenity's Homepage... for nothing and without ads! If you're interested in a free webspace, just go there and change the URL to go to the root of the domain. (www...) Yes, I know this is a kind of ad but when you find good stuff, you must share the info. ;-)

I first made a very quick and dirty homepage then I took the time to re-write it with a nice CSS styling that kinda looks like Serenity widgets style without the round corners... and a logo.

Some people might recognize the logo or have a feeling of déjà-vu. That's normal. I drew it from scratch but it's designed to vaguely mimic the logo of the Serenity spaceship in the eponym movie that concluded the Firefly TV show. It can't stand the comparison because I can't draw... except with geometrical shapes like in a widget style.

On Serenity's homepage, I also put the last version of the sources. I made a slight color change on all the editable widgets like editlines, spin widgets, combobox and the text editor frames. There used to have a very subtle sunken look but it was too subtle. I flattened everything and that's just fine. The widgets are now flat until a mouseover or a focus activation raised an action button and that means no special effect on the edit fields.

The other color change I did is on the toolbuttons. I didn't see why they must have the same color than the buttons. So, they have no color at all. Well, they use the color of their background toolbar which is tinted and raised or sunken on mouseover and on activation. (Please, somebody remind me that I still have to correct the color of the arrow and label.)

I wanted to change the color of the scrollbar slider but I didn't like the result of my various attempts. I just keep the idea in mind for the day I'll find the right color mix.

In the mean time, I played with the window decoration. I still haven't found the killer icon theme for the buttons but I saw a screenshot on KDE-Look.org of Serenity style used with a BeOS-like window decoration. For the youngsters who don't know what it is, that's a windec where the titlebar looks like a tab on top of the window instead of occupying the whole top area. The screenshot used the ugly B2 windec (available in standard KDE) but I liked the concept of an irregular window frame. I just did it. I looked at B2 sources but was too lazy to get accustomed with them so I did it my way.

The titlebar isn't as tight packed as on B2 but you get the general look. I even add the possible to choose where the titlebar pseudo-tab is placed (on the left or on the right). For me, with the closer button on the left, it's better to put it on the left. For the majority of the people, it will be on the right so that the closer button is on the right border of the window. I don't like that but if you maximize the window, the titlebar will expand itself to occupy the whole top area if the windec is configured to have square corners or no frame at all when maximized. I took care of the case when the titlebar is so wide that there is no room left to draw a good empty corner and this setting has become my favorite one.

I'm ready almost ready for a new release. Already! ;-)