KDE: Beyond the shadows

For some reason, I put my nose into the sources of that old "Desktop Textshadows" module and I sneezed because of the dust. Two years old already and not a single update so, as vacations away from Serenity, I decided to do some spring cleansing.

First, I broke apart the dialog that was strangely designed with a lot of useless spacers. Then I made the module actually use the colors of the desktop configuration for its preview. That was the really tricky part because I had to find a way to set a color for the preview background that doesn't make disappear either the text or the shadow.

At this very moment, I wrote a mail to the author to ask for the permission to publish my patched version of his module on KDE-Apps, or else to offer him my work. And I got frustrated because I didn't get an immediate answer.

I may look calm but, inside, I'm a volcano or maybe a super-nova. Instead of wasting my burst of energy against the author who has probably something more important to do, I attacked this poor defenseless module again and again.

I added the possibility to choose the colors of the text and the shadow and I greatly simplify my method to choose the preview background and I went to bed.

Today, I'm wondering why I wouldn't make the next step: To gather all the options relating to the desktop texts. Right now, things are scattered in every corners of the control center. You choose the font at one place. The options to change the colors are well hidden at some place where you can activate the shadow but not configure it. That's why this "Desktop Textshadows" was written. Another place to go. And if you want to activate the hidden feature --Tooltips over the desktop icons-- all you can do is launch a text editor.

So I will extend the module to become the missing page of the desktop configuration: "Desktop text configuration" or something like that.

Whatever the author of the module might say, it's mine now! ;-)

I thought that managing the font would be difficult but it isn't. KDE provides the KFontRequester. Qt provides QFont and that's all I need to change the font of the desktop... for the most part. I already took care of the hardest part: Setting the colors. The other options are too easy to handle to be worth a mention. So...

I'm going to bed because it's already sunday but the result of my boredom should appear soon on KDE-Apps.