KDE: In the pipes

That's it, the new version 1.1 of Serenity is in the pipes. I already packed the window decoration sources. I need to do a few changes in the new colorschemes I added to the style and I will be able to pack these sources too.

There's nothing new in the style, except some corrections of two visual bugs that I totally missed last time. I never use the sidebar of Konqueror so I didn't see what happened to the whatever-its-name button with the popup menu. On the other hand, I tested extensively the QToolButtons but I didn't test the tab focus. So when I introduced QToolButtons in Serenity's windec configuration dialog, I got an unpleasant surprise. The focus rectangle was drawn twice. That's strange because I don't remember seeing in Qt's sources that it draws the focus rectangle by itself. Whatever. Two bugs fixed.

And why did I need to add new widgets in the the windec configuration? Once again, it's because of the Fitts' law: Bigger target, easier target. So now, there's a toolbutton for every windec button supported by Serenity. If you activate it, the corresponding button will be enlarged by a factor of 3/2. It means that it doesn't apply to the closer button only, you can choose which one(s) you want to enlarge... upto enlarging all of them. I chose to enlarge the two buttons I use the most: the closer and the minimizer. It looks like that:

And before that, I found what the new Alpha icontheme should look like. I removed the letter-like icons that I found too weird and I drew new icons in the alpha channel. They are totally transparent... well, invisible. ;-) You know where your buttons are, so the symbols are useless. However, in order not to be too confusing, Serenity uses the mouseover color to draw the buttons.

The symbols appear on mouseover and they stay visible on the toggle buttons (maximizer, sticky and keep above/below) which are activated. I don't know if this will be my future favorite button style but I'm using it right now and I find it nice and very usable.

On the KDE front, my cosmetic patches for KDE 3.5.5 are also somewhere in the pipes. I'm waiting for my SVN account to be able to apply them directly to KDE sources. Aaron Seigo got convinced that I could do it myself. I'm gonna have to learn some new tricks; SVN is rather abstruse to me yet. I don't want to bring down the whole thing because of my inexperience. :-D

Patching KDE is a rather addictive occupation. I can't help it...

I'll come back when I'll get my SVN account to tell how easy or hard it is to work with SVN.