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genericity

Jin Liu Beijing, China
Hi, I am genericity and I create Various KDE 1.-4. Improvements and Various KDE 1.-4. Styles.

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Last time active : May 07 2011
Joined : Dec 15 2009
Various KDE 1.-4. Improvements

Scale Up

Various KDE 1.-4. Improvements Apr 14 2010
Score 72.2%

Pulse

Various KDE 1.-4. Improvements Apr 13 2010
Score 67.1%
Various KDE 1.-4. Styles

Chromi

Various KDE 1.-4. Styles Feb 22 2010
Score 79.5%
by MrBumpy4096
Score 67.0%
Apr 07 2010
Never mind. Looks like a Firefox problem. - Jul 02 2010
In your theme, inactive tabs are a little smaller than the active tab, and the mouse-clicking zone is smaller too. This is different from the "real" Oxygen, where inactive tabs look smaller, but the mouse zone still occupy the full height of the tab bar.

This is very useful when the tab bar is at the top of screen, so one can just move the mouse to the top and switch tabs, instead of aiming a smaller tab. So I hope you can duplicate this behavior too. - Jul 02 2010
Pulse

Various KDE 1.-4. Improvements 37 comments

by genericity
Score 67.1%
Apr 13 2010
BTW, looking at the "opaque" problem a few times, I think if made more subtle, it can be a nice open/close effect in itself, LOL. Will make a try at that. - Apr 20 2010
Sorry, don't bother with rebuilding. Tested on my laptop --- same problem.

For a quick&dirty fix, edit this file:
/usr/share/kde4/services/kwin/pulse.desktop
Change the last line from:
X-KDE-Ordering=50
to
X-KDE-Ordering=70

This moves Pulse lower priority than Fade, preventing Fade from resetting the window opacity.

But I shall still change the source code. Thanks for informing. :-) - Apr 20 2010
1. Try get the latest dev libraries and build the package yourself. Maybe this can fix the problem.

2. Pulse conflicts with other "window appearing" effects (e.g. Fade), so you can't really have both Pulse and Fade in the same window.

Do you want to use Pulse for toplevel (application) windows and Fade for other windows (e.g. menu)? If so, I can make this change.
- Apr 20 2010
Could you share your settings? The default settings are copied from the Plasma effect, and I think they do need to be more subtle. - Apr 11 2010
Pulse uses exactly the same conflict-prevention code as ScaleIn. In fact ScaleIn also doesn't skip popups when Sheet is on. If you look really carefully at the Sheet animations with ScaleIn on and off, you'll see the difference.

The problem is not in Pulse or ScaleIn, but in Sheet --- it's missing one line of code. SlidingPopups has this code, so you'll see both Pulse and ScaleIn play nicely with the Plasma sliding popup effect. This is really a bug in KWin's builtin effects. Please report this bug to KDE. - Apr 09 2010
There's already a "fade" effect in KDE. So I'll just do a "scale out" effect, still following Plasma. - Apr 08 2010
Checked the SVN --- the enum is still there in kwineffect.h. Strange... - Apr 08 2010
Looks like the KDE version is too low. The source code is based on KDE 4.4.2, so probably won't work on KDE 4.3. Sorry. - Apr 07 2010
Nice ideas. Surely it's possible. Need to learn how to do config UI, but shouldn't be too hard. - Apr 07 2010
Me too, LOL.

That said, I do think Plasma has many nice tricks that should be ported to the rest of KDE. E.g., that "toolbox" which pops from the side of widgets, I'd like to make a similar window decoration. - Apr 07 2010
Scale Up

Various KDE 1.-4. Improvements 7 comments

by genericity
Score 72.2%
Apr 14 2010
Found it:
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kwin&m=126100317412179&w=2

Personally I'm quite happy with "Display content when resizing windows". But I think your patch should be make into another resizing effect (not replacing the current one), and surely someone would love it.

We can let the user choose in the 3 ways (display content, the current resizing effect, your resizing effect). Each has its own pros and cons. - Apr 14 2010
Chromi

Various KDE 1.-4. Styles 58 comments

by genericity
Score 79.5%
Feb 22 2010
I've no reliable method to move the search box away, but you can use Ctrl+MouseWheel to shrink the titlebar and reveal part of the search box. Hope this helps. - Mar 26 2010
OK, I can somewhat understand this.
You need to open the file src/CMakeLists.txt, replace ${KDE4WORKSPACE_KDECORATIONS_LIBS} with kdecorations in the 3rd line. So it should look like:
target_link_libraries(kwin3_chromi ${KDE4_KDEUI_LIBS} ${KDE4_PLASMA_LIBS} kdecorations ${X11_X11_LIB})
- Mar 26 2010
Sorry, no idea. It should be -lkdecorations (i.e., links /usr/lib/libkdecorations.so), but where is that KDE4_Workspace__ thing come from? I'm using Debian so no idea about Gentoo building processes. - Mar 25 2010
Not for now. I need to learn how to do Qt UI first. May take a while. - Mar 11 2010
Thanks for the test drive, Robert!

However, I'll abandon that attempt, and try to add launcher support to panzi's Smooth Tasks (http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Smooth+Tasks?content=101586) instead. It has much more features than my pet project.

You can try the first result here:
http://bitbucket.org/jinliu/smooth-tasks/get/a82d04ea9e6b.gz

There's a lot of pieces missing (pin/unpin/tool tip/etc.), but I'm now pretty sure they are not so hard to implement.

BTW: Only tested on 4.4.1. Hope it works on your KDE trunk :-) - Mar 08 2010
I installed Debian's KDE 4.4.1 unofficial packages, rebuilt this decoration, and it works OK. I don't meet aforementioned problems (titlebar disappearing, etc.).

Make sure to upgrade *-dev packages to 4.4, delete the "build" directory, and build from scratch. Hope this can fix the problem. - Mar 07 2010
It's another of my project. Too early for showtime, but you can give it a try anyway:

http://github.com/jinliu/plasma-superbar-cxx

The launchers are from your Kickoff favorites. - Feb 24 2010
Nice ideas!

> 1. If a window is narrower than X pixels, just draw a "normal" title bar above it.

Done. However, I can't switch between full/mini mode on resizing, so this decision is made once and for all when the window is created.

> 2. Chromi doesn't allow title-bar buttons to be customized.

On front of my todo list.

> 3. An algorithm for finding the max acceptable width.

I'm thinking about the same thing.

Client window ID is readily available. The hard part is reliably detect empty space with very small performance hit.

Your algorithm is simple enough, but there are some complexities, e.g., Tk menubar has a border; Firefox tabbar has a gradient; etc. Need to do some experiments for a works-most-of-time thing. - Feb 22 2010
No I'm using Debian sid/KDE 4.3.

I changed the window embedding code so that may be the problem. Could you try this version to see if it works:

http://github.com/jinliu/kwin-deco-chromi/tarball/v0.11a

I reverted the change in the above version. - Feb 21 2010
Ah, I recognized you meant *some* themes were slower than others. I feel themes with transparency/shadow are slower, perhaps because notebooks/netbooks are not good at rendering transparency. Try solid and shadowless themes, like Nano. - Feb 20 2010
Fixed. That kdelibs6-dev thing is a typo. Thanks.

Most of processing power is spent on SVG rendering. This makes Chromi (and Aurorae) slower than other "hand-drawn" decorations. It's especially evident in window resizing, where a lot of repainting is going on.

Perhaps we can make an alternate version whose rendering code is based on Oxygen. Should work better with netbooks. - Feb 20 2010
Nice idea. I'll do it.

The only problem is what if two "Dolphin" windows have different settings. For simplicity I'll use the last setting. - Feb 20 2010
You can change the KDE color in:
System settings-Appearance-Colors-Colors-Active/Inactive Titlebar.

However, you can't make the background transparent. I'm still trying to figure out how to do that, but unsure if it's possible at all. - Feb 20 2010
I've not upgraded to KDE 4.4 yet (Debian is really slow on this), so maybe this is a 4.4-only problem and I'll check it once Debian has 4.4. Sorry. - Feb 19 2010
It's easy to make the bar width proportional to the window. I'll try that.

However, what I really want is to "detect" how much space is left in the application window. This will detect many current problems:
* The application menu may have "Help" in the rightmost corner, covered by the bar.
* The application may not have a menu, so the toolbar/search box/etc. is covered by the bar.

But this is very hard. I've no idea how to "peek" inside the application window, and tell whitespace (which I can use) from contents (which I shouldn't cover). - Jan 26 2010
Sorry I'm really new to SVG (and KDE in general) programming, and my sole example is Aurorae.

Do I have to draw a solid background in the chosen color, then draw the (translucent) SVG over it? I'll do some experiments on this tomorrow. - Jan 26 2010
It's more than hardcoded --- everything you see is from SVG files installed in /usr/share/kde4/apps/chromi. The only color I programmed is the white text color.

So you need to edit the SVG files to change color. I'm sorry but there's no simple fix to this. - Jan 26 2010
I like the "rounding" idea (like the round corners of Chrome tabs, right?). Hope I can implement it without too much performance hit.

About the "shinny" thing, could you give a link or two showing how it should look like? Thanks.

I have to admit that I don't have a clue about making artworks, and all images in this were from the Aurorae theme "Chrome" (which comes out just when I needed it, amazing...). Maybe I should make it possible to load any Aurorae theme, and we can extend the theme format a little so you can specify how the tab should look like (width, rounded corner, etc.). - Jan 25 2010
You are right about long title lines. What makes me mad is they don't have to be that long --- look at the screenshot, the three windows could easily titled "Dolphin", "Konsole", and "Emacs", because the document name is available in other part of the window.

Icon-only is a solution, but it doesn't look as good... - Jan 25 2010
BeClock

Various KDE 1.-4. Improvements 285 comments

by thomas12777
Score 85.2%
Mar 04 2012
I think you forgot to bump the version in .desktop. No big deal, anyway :-) - Mar 14 2010
Now I see no slowdown, even with mouse hovering. Good job!

I think quite a lot of pure-informational widgets (e.g. system load, network) are better down this way. Maybe I can adapt your idea to some of these... - Jan 19 2010
Good job!

I think one possible option is to auto-hide the clock when the mouse is nearby. So to see something under the clock, you just move the mouse over. - Jan 06 2010
Smooth Tasks

Plasma 4 Widgets 842 comments

by panzi
Score 86.9%
Nov 05 2010
Hi panzi,

I added primitive support for launchers to Smooth Tasks. You can find the change in:

http://bitbucket.org/jinliu/smooth-tasks

Select the group mode "Pinned", then the context menu has a new item "Pin". Use it to pin a task to the bar. (Must have a .desktop file the same name as the window class.)

Hope you can merge this into your code. :-) - Mar 08 2010
Chrome Aurorae

Aurorae Themes 24 comments

by Scnd101
Score 76.0%
Jan 25 2010
And can I have the honor to list you in the "authors" of that deco? Thanks. - Jan 25 2010
Thank you. This is by far my most favorite Aurorae. (and the dark version looks good too)

I've used your SVGs in my experimental decoration Chromi (http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=119069&forumpage=1). I could never make it as pretty my self. Thanks again! - Jan 25 2010
Could you also provide the "restore" version of the maximize button? (when maximized, the button looks like "two stacked windows") - Jan 25 2010
Guess s/he means the hover effect in Chrome --- the button under mouse gets a white border.

Anyway, good job! - Jan 24 2010
Air-oxygen

Aurorae Themes 61 comments

by megabigbug
Score 75.5%
Jun 06 2010
Same here. Debian w/ KDE 4.3.4. KWin crashes when selecting this theme in the preview. - Jan 17 2010
Colibri

Various KDE 1.-4. Improvements 155 comments

by bk12
Score 84.6%
May 15 2013
What's that Win7-like taskbar in your screenshot? Looks nice. - Dec 15 2009
gmail-plasmoid

Plasma 4 Widgets
by mjmccans

Score 76.9%
Apr 15 2010
Chrome Aurorae

Aurorae Themes
by Scnd101

Score 76.0%
Jan 24 2010
BeClock

Various KDE 1.-4. Improvements
by thomas12777

Score 85.2%
Jan 05 2010
Bespin

Be-Shell/Bespin
by thomas12777

Score 82.7%
Dec 22 2009
Aurorae Theme Engine

Various Plasma Styles
by mgraesslin

Score 82.0%
Dec 22 2009
Daisy

Plasma 4 Widgets
by Lechio

Score 81.9%
Dec 21 2009
Score 67.0%
Dec 21 2009