KDE: What's next?

That's it. It's very late or very early in the morning and a new Serenity has landed on KDE-Look. Version 0.9. There is still a few work left for the first non-beta version.

And I found the right color for the scrollbar slider. The scrollbar is now rather monochromatic --except for the HTML pages that set special colors-- so it doesn't look like to have a button in its middle any more. I find it much less distracting than before. While I'm typing here, I almost don't see the slider.

Err... I forgot to change accordingly... or differently the "real" slider (the one that can have tickmarks). One more thing for the next version. :-D

I also implemented a "killer" icon theme for the window decoration. I don't think everybody will call it "killer" but I like it some much that I've already forgotten the formerly beloved Serenity icon theme. I even managed to find very quickly a name for this new theme: Trinary. (And I definitively like this SnowFields colorscheme!) The configuration dialog itself uses the Powder theme as revised for Serenity but look at the preview.

Don't try this at home! ;-) It's a fake actually. Serenity engine produced every pixel that's on the picture but I patched two pictures together to show the two possible locations of the pseudo-tab titlebar with buttons in a practical order for both situations.

One last thing I was thinking about last time I wrote in my blog: The taskbar buttons. They've always been a P.I.T.A. and they're still are because of the way Kicker draws them but --at least-- I did something good for them: I give them the same look than the toolbuttons: No color except the background color that is tinted to show that they are hovered or activated. --I got the impression I already wrote something like that.-- ;-) By the way, I wonder why those eff'ing widgets aren't just plain toolbuttons? What got thru the head of the guy who decided to use QHeader's? That's weird. I'm gonna look in Kicker sources.

While I'll be at it, I'll build diff files for all the cosmetic patches I made to KDE 3.5.3 and I'm gonna send them to the KDE Dev list. Well, I'm gonna first change these patches into real pieces of code to make the difference once for all.

For example, the toolbuttons. KDE decides by itself of the colors to use for the label and the arrow. Wrong approach. That's a job for the style. So, to become a real pieace of code, my patch will delegate everything to the style and I will be able to stop complaining once for all. Well, if I don't forget to let them be more respectful of the reverse layout.

There is also this KTabCtl which made my eyes bleed more than once. My tiny patch must be applied to KDE 3.5.4. That will be the first one I'll send... to test the water. ;-)

There are quite a few backup files in my KDE source tree. It will distract me from Serenity for a while.

Well, it's high time to stop daydreaming and to get to work... err... to bed to "night-dream".