KDE: Five digits

Serenity reached the amazing 5-digit number of downloads. (I know, I'm easily amazed.) But it also lost 2% of its rating. I'm preparing the version 1.3.0 to get those 2% back. Well, sort of. I'm not that obsessed with Serenity rating.

Sometimes, I forget that Serenity doesn't belong to me any more but to the users. That's why I removed two options that should have remained: The switches for the menubar groove and for the toolbar handles. I liked it this way but I'm not the only one to use Serenity. Any way, there are still other distinctive features left.

Well, next I'll reintroduce the switch for the toolbar handles. As somebody told me, moving the toolbars around isn't so common. I even don't think that many people ever did it. I liked the handles but I've personally never moved a single toolbar. Go figure! --No, don't try. ;-)

As for the menubar, I didn't re-introduced a stich to enable/disable it. This option now uses a combobox to select in between the solid frame I wanted to impose, two very light lines that are even more serene, and nothing at all. I also improved the drawing. During my experimentations to reach the 2-line design, I totally disabled the drawing of the menubar frame and I realized that any kind of fill was "exaggerated" while only a framing was needed. The menubar entries draw their own background and the style also has to take care of the space beyond them. So, a 2-pixel thick frame is all that's actually left to draw... And I can even still improve everything in making Qt filling the menubar for me so that all that remains would be to draw the round corners, or the two lines, or else nothing at all. I will try that.

I shouldn't do this for a "dot zero" version but I added the support for new widgets: The tooltips. I have disabled them for years but there is still one of them that's available: The "What's this" tooltip and it made my eyes bleed. And the "real" tooltips were too tight packed for my liking. I improved them with round corners and a selectable background color --within certain limits as I say in the changelog. In fact, they use the base color (the usually white color of the edit lines) which is tainted with a selectable color. This way, the tooltips also support white text. KDE's default behavior is a hardcoded light yellow background which makes white text totally illegible.

I tried the same thing with Konqueror's file tips. By the way, I had a hard time re-enabling them because the buttons tooltips must be activated first for the file tips to appear. I don't understand the connection but that's the way it is. Any way, I tried to make Konqueror's file tips look like the "real" tooltips... and I failed... partially. It works fine except that the color of the text looks like hardcoded to black somewhere I haven't found yet. I dug deep into KDE's and Qt's sources. I tried very hard to change that nasty palette, I went upto the point of inserting an HTML tag to change the color of the text... and failed. I'll keep on digging later. For the moment, I check the base color and if it's rather dark, I use white instead. I'm not fully satisfied but it works well with a "common" colorscheme: black text on bright background.

I'll keep on digging because I know another kind of tooltip that causes me problems too: KPassivePopup. It's even worst than KonqFileTips because, this time, I even didn't succeed in changing the background color of the text. I guess I didn't reach the widget I had to. --A quick look in KDE's sources told me "yes" for KPassivePopup and "I don't know" for KonqFileTips. The big problem in C++ is that it may be very hard to retrieve what does what in sources you didn't write by yourself.

Whatever, that will be for Serenity 1.4. Right now, I'm just going to optimize the drawing of the menubar for the version 1.3.0... and try to regain my --not so important-- 2%. ;-)