Aya updates (was Re: Plasma and KWin Integration)

[Jamboarder]

> From: Sebastian Kügler <sebas at kde.org>
> On Thursday 12 February 2009 17:44:14 Jamboarder wrote:
> > Let me know what you'd like to see improved in Aya and I'll work on it.
> 
> I hadn't had a look at Aya in a while (I think only at what has been shipped 
> with OpenSuse). I'm now running it for a bit and I think it looks much better 
> already.


great!

> 
> - I'm not totally sold one the right border, for some applets, it looks good, 
>   for others, it looks unrefined. It's also shown on the applet handle, making 
>   it look out of balance (between handle left/right) Why is this border there 
>   at all?

Purely an aesthetic decision in the KDE 4.1 debut of the theme.  The new applet handles for 4.2 introduced this imbalance when the standard background was used for the handle.  I had a local patch for the applet handle to use it's own background svg but I could decide if it was worth introducing yet another theme element... but it does tie the theme author's hands a bit when trying to do asymmetric backgrounds.  Still, I'm thinking about how to tweak this border for a future Aya release.

> 
> - The black text doesn't give enough contrast on the folderview at the top
> 
> - same goes for IconWidgets, inside the toolbox for example, also the text on 
>   the taskbar buttons looks unrefined


Not sure if will help but there was a post 4.2 update of the theme available in trunk and via GHNS that improved the focused task element.  That said, the text colors are part of the global color scheme and the text rendering handled by the respective applets.  Aya doesn't control either of these.  Perhaps the rendering of black text on lighter backgrounds could be improved a touch in the plasma libs/applets.  There is also an inconsistency between how the text shadows are handled in the folderview (center-blurred) and in the task bar (offset-blurred) when the text color is dark.  Aya is one of the few test cases for black text on lighter backgrounds - at least when the kde global color scheme is set to the Oxygen.  Try Aya with Obsidian Coast color scheme to see if the text problems remain.

> 
> - The menu that pops up for grouped tasks is missing the highlights, there's 
>   no hover feedback for the tasks right now

I've noticed this happening for other themes as well (even Oxygen).  I don't think I've missed an element in the Aya theme, but I might be wrong.  I think the highlight uses the tasks.svg hover element, right? On a rare occasion I'll see the highlights show up correctly.  Not sure what's causing it though. 

> 
> Otherwise, Aya has come quite far, congrats to that!

Thanks so much for the feedback.  I'll see what I can do to address the issues you've raised. My mild OCD will compel Aya tweakage for the foreseable future. :-)

Andrew (Jamboarder) Lake