What to do about KColor?

Guillaume Laurent glaurent at telegraph-road.org
Mon May 28 17:24:15 BST 2007


On May 28, 2007, at 4:37 PM, Ingo Klöcker wrote:

> Alpha is pretty much irrelevant for the normal user of colors.  
> Moreover,
> alpha is something a bit artifical since it doesn't occur in the real
> world. At least not in the same way as in computer graphics. OTOH,
> mixing colors is something that everybody should know from his or her
> childhood. Alpha is important for people doing computer graphics, but
> for most non-graphics application developer colors are opaque.

Would you think alpha has any use in a music application ? Yet in  
Rosegarden we'd be very glad to have it, because it would spare us  
the extensive computation of specific color values for when music  
segments overlap each other. Also, having been an OS/X user for a bit  
more than 6 months now, I can vouch that translucency has many good  
uses, (as in "actually useful", not just flashy).


> I will
> rarely if ever change the alpha channel of a color and in fact I  
> mostly
> want to ignore that the alpha channel does exist. I don't want to have
> to think about it.

Then don't, in a sane implementation the default alpha value should  
be set to 'opaque'.


> That's my view as an application developer whose
> most important need for color is the colors showing the validity of
> signed messages.
>

Many others might have different views, and not just computer  
graphics people.


--
Guillaume
http://telegraph-road.org


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