Re: Drop shadow madness

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Sun, 2003-02-16 at 13:06, MArk Finlay wrote:
> This isn't perfect but my god does it looks sweet :)
> This one is going in my personal collection.
> 
> There are some obvious issues with it:
> * When the "bit that the shadow is on" changes the shaddow
> does not and looks rather silly. For example start an app that
> will take a few seconds to load, then click the applications menu,
> if the app shows up under the applications menu you will still have bits
> of your desktop around the appliations menu.

This is X sucking.  In order to make this work and not be extremely
slow, XRender or whatnot would have to support the blending.  This is
the big argument against having window transparency in GTK at all, since
it is (has Iain so eloquently pointed out ;-) a large hack to do this at
all.

> * Maximise a window and click on applications on the menu panel
> with the window in focus. The window will now loose focus and it's
> title bar's color will change, but the menu shaddow area still shows
> the window title with the focused color.

Again, this would require more hacking.  Likely require some kind of
evil WM trickery, since what I expect is happening is that the menu code
is grabbing the screen image before the WM has updated, and this is
tricky to do given they are separate processes (and thus
"asynchonous").  Yay X.

> * Sometimes(seems random) the shadow area is not drawn properly. Moving
> between view and edit menus in gedit really quickly, I sometimes have
> half of the open toolbar button cut off.
> 
> I'd love to see if these issues can be resolved. Then maybe we could get
> it into gtk :)

Please gods no.  ^,^  Let's wait until this can be done *correctly*,
using real X techniques that actually work with a semblance of speed and
accuracy.  Then we can have all sorts of goodness like translucent
menues and window shadows and fancy shadowy/translucent overlays and
translucent/anti-aliased drag-n-drop icon cursor thingies and all that. 
With leprechaun marshmallows.  ^,^

> 
> I wonder if kde has any of these problems.
> 
> On Sun, 2003-02-16 at 14:40, iain wrote:
> > Okay,
> > First off
> > I don't expect to see this committed.
> > Ever.
> > It's a hack.
> > There's even a hack inside the hack
> > Thats how hacky this hacky hack is.
> > 
> > But I've been using it for a week now
> > And I love it.
> > It seems to add a modicum of class
> > And style to my otherwise dreery drab desktop.
> > 
> > So I am sharing it with the rest of the world.
> > But, like I say
> > It's a hack.
> > There's occasions where it won't look right.
> > And those occasions will never look right
> > With this hack.
> > I know about them
> > I don't care about them.
> > If it breaks - 
> > Congratulations, you get to keep all the bits.
> > 
> > And so, without further ado...
> > I give you
> > the gtkmenu drop shadow hack
> > 
> > Taadaa!
> > (and yes, I nicked the arrays of values off of kde-look.org
> >  which means that if you apply that patch to your KDE, then
> >  the two drop shadows will look the same)
> > 
> > Enjoy
> > iain