cat /dev/maxilys

A glance in the mind of a KDE/Linux developer to see how ideas turn into code.

2006-09-26

KDE: Daily build

Just after the last release of Serenity I suddenly wasn't satisfied of the result any more, so --this time-- I'm waiting a little while to find the last glitches.

And I found some. First, I drew new thinner arrows for the tree expanders. The biggest arrows of Serenity were just too thick. And this time, I didn't counted in binary on my fingers.

Well, I never did but I drew grids, numbered the columns (8, 4, 2, 1, 8, 4, 2, 1, etc) and blackened cells to be able to count in hexadecimal. That was a real P.I.T.A! I had to find a piece of paper and never was able to draw a straight grid on a white sheet. I dropped the archaic pen and paper for the mouse and screen approach. I just (re-)discovered Kolourpaint which can save bitmaps in XBM format. Just what I needed. Instead of cutting trees for Serenity's bitmaps, I now cut lines of text. That's lighter to carry. :-D

After that, I just left Serenity live its life on screen... until today. I wanted to see if I could do something for the tiny flickering that happens when the window frame is drawn over the zen borders. (To see it, you actually need to generate a massive number of redraws.) It allowed me to discover a bug that I didn't see because I never maximize my windows. I tried to be too clever and I didn't make enough tests. Any way, I fixed this and introduced a new bug: When the window is maximized and the frame deactivated, the space in between the titlebar and the content disappeared instead of the top space. That made me laugh because it took me a long time to find the bug that was right under my nose. But I decided to turn that bug into a feature that will make the "fullscreeners" happy. ;-) The titlebar now can become as small as possible without any space.

I did nothing for the tiny flickering --Seeing it isn't easy. However I disabled the zen border from the inactive windows. Just a few fractions of seconds spared for the users, even if that's not as much nice.

The only thing I need now is a new gradient style that doesn't make disappear a corner of every button to match the new "Milky Way" colorscheme... and a bunch of new snapshots!

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