KDE 3.5.4: Some reasons to get excited

KDE once again escaped to its developers and a new release just appeared yesterday. This is only a maintenance release but I got however excited. The patch I attached to one of my bug reports is in this KDE. ;-) (As if that was the only thing that matters.)

However, I still had to jump through some hoops during the upgrade. First, the icons that I don't like. I definitively prefer the previous Crystal SVG incarnation, especially the action icons. That's a detail but the icons are included in KDE-base and there's no way not to install them. Second, Konqueror's toolbar got another of these un-erasable icons that I had to remove by hand. (Grumble... SuSE... Grumble...)

To retrieve that excitement, I apply my seven cosmetic patches to KDE. See my blog of 4th June about previous update for details. The ones that aren't described there include some patches to remove some hardcoded colors or to make some KDE widgets respect the reverse layout a little more (for right-to-left scripts) --There is still work to do in this area.-- or else to prevent an also hardcoded content shift here or then under mouse click.

And this time I send all my patches to the KDE-devel list. For some reason, I was waiting. I waited so long that KDE 3.5.4 caught me by surprise. Alas! I wanted to send my patches before its release. I'm not sure every of them will be accepted but I hope some of them will. That will make me less work for KDE 3.5.5. ;-)

So I updated KDE, it was time to update Serenity too. I'm not really satisfied with the new Alpha icontheme for the window decoration. It's not ugly but it's strange... or at least very unusual. I don't know what to do with it yet. If I remove this icontheme, I'll have to replace it... but with what? No idea. And that will leave nothing new for the window decoration but code improvement. Not very visible. I'll figure out something.

In the mean time, I made the modification to the style that I wanted to do for a long time: Give the possibility to tune the popup sub-menu delay. I use a lot of quick browsers and I always found that the sub-menu open themselves too quickly. Qt, nice Qt allows us to change that. The usual delay within KDE is around 1/10 sec. Serenity allows you to have values in between 1/50 sec and (around) 1/3 sec. I don't know if there is any interest in accelerating the sub-menus but, personally, I already slowed down mine to the maximum. I have to stop moving the mouse so that a sub-menu gets opened. That incredible! The mouse cursor looks like to fly, slide, whatever over the menus. For the quick browsers, that's nice that mammoth directories like /bin or /etc don't slow you down when you don't actually want to open them. For the regular menus, that delay is irrelevant but in the K-Menu that's different. There are so many sub-menus that is nice they don't get opened just because the mouse hovers them.

In fact, I think that I should even increase the delay up to 1/2 second. I noticed that I always slow down when I'm about the reach my target. Some parasite sub-menus still appear. A longer delay should also prevent this.

And I'm leaving right now. I got an idea for a new Alpha icontheme. Something that will justify its name. (A background process just terminated.) ;-)