KDE: I did it again!

That's it, Serenity 1.2 is out in the wild. It took me longer than expected because I took the time to do all the changes I wanted.

First, there was that little itch in the titlebar. I had resisted since version 0.9 to the urge to scratch it. With the BeOS/B2-alike titlebars, there wasn't always enough room left for the title. It was never more than a dozen of pixels but that was irritating to me. Now Serenity automagically cuts parts on both ends to make the title fit. It's not perfect but that's an improvement over the past. I played a lot with it and enjoyed seeing the title shrink and grow while I was resizing the window. (Boys will be boys.) ;-)

Second, two things I noted in a corner of my mind: The separators in the tabbars and in the scrollbars. For some reason they were simple lines and I never took the time to changed them into gradients... until yesterday. That's more "serene" and that fits well with the new soft gradient in the active tab. I was touching the tab drawing routine so I did the most I could, and that meant to soften these flashy gradients I couldn't stand. Now, the "Serene gradient" is the way I like to see an active tab. --I can even stand the "Highlighted gradient" sometimes with the right colors.

Next: The radiobuttons. The problem was that with the new Zen gradients, the radiobuttons looked too square. The outline was still a circle but it didn't matter, the inner gradients just turned it into a square. My job was just the opposite: to turn a square into a circle, well, to turn four straight gradients into a circle. It was easier to do than to say! I already had the image and the algorithm in my mind before to start to code. These radiobuttons however drove me nuts! I made no error... except in the way I chose the colors. I broke everything into pieces before to realize where I turned right instead of left --more or less. Any way, the result is so nice that I updated my previous blog so that it keeps on making sense with the new image. ;-)

Now, I'm gonna drop Serenity for a while... a long while and take care of patching KDE before version 3.5.5 comes out. Something I'd like to fix is the fact that KDE opens a file in the first available supporting application --if it is already opened-- instead of looking for it in the current desktop first. In clear, for example, Kate is running on 1st and 2nd desktops. The current desktop is #2. You click on a text file and it get --silently-- opened on desktop #1. Stoopid! Any way, I think I'm gonna have fun with this bug. A little challenge...