Amarok look

[Nikolaj Hald Nielsen]

> Firstly we are using svg's but we are rendering them the wrong way.
> Every svg that has corners and is scaled in some way should be done in
> several pieces and in a way that everything is scaled but the corners
> or they loose their aspect and result in something not nice. Seems
> like we are using svgs in a lot of places and are not doing it the
> sane way.

This is true for some svgs ( mainly the ones used in the playlist ),
but at these only ever change their width, and not their height, 3
parts to each should be enough. For many of our svgs, such as the ones
used for sliders and volume control and such, we actually do have
multiple parts ( again, as the height is fixed, we use 3 parts ).

For the plasma applet background, we basically use ( except for the
new black applets ) the standard plasma way of drawing backgrounds,
and this actually correctly renders 9 different parts. If you look in
the src/theme/context/Amarok-Mockup/widgtets/bckground.svg file, which
is what is used as the background for most applets, you will notice
that it actually contains 9 parts, even if it is just plain white. So
the extremely poor caling of the new album applet is simply because it
draws its own background and does not use a sane background theme ( I
think it will look much better when all applets use a simmilar theme )


> Other problem is that by using monochromatic svg themes and then
> tinting them doesn't work very well, apart that then artists are very
> limited to create themes, themes won't be very well adapted to the
> current desktop theme. By using svgs in a lot of places makes it very
> difficult that the application looks integrated with the environment
> since it's not only about colours but other things like button's
> shapes for instance.

The use of svg file to theme Amarok is actually one of the things I
personally really like about the app at this point, even though I
accept that it does make some things more difficult. Amarok 2.0.0 is a
bit of a testbed for us, so we will likely rethink many things when we
start to figure out where to go next.

Also, in the future, there is really no reason that we could not have
a system that made it possible to tint svgs with the correct gradients
based on their position within the app, if we know exactly what rules
oxygen applies. In fact, this would fit quite nicely into the current
svg tinting/caching system.

> And finally since we are using plasma for the context view, qt
> graphics view framework for the playlist on the right and qt widgets
> for the collection browser it results very difficulty to make the
> application visually coherent and also very difficult for artists to
> collaborate since they need to be working on three different things
> that work different from each other.

I actually think that making things that look consistent across the
main svg theme and the plasma applets should be possible as they both
use svgs, especially if we improve the svg tining ( see above )

> pinheiro suggests that we should really care about the svg scaling
> issue and that we should solve it as soon as possible. For the last
> issue he suggests that we shouldn't be using three different
> frameworks, we should be using at most two and preferably only one but
> it's something that maybe couldn't be done now unless we delay the
> release date.

Besides the plasma applets ( which really should not have this issue
if we get a proper background theme ), the only place I see this issue
is in the playlist ( and with the service list in the "internet" tab )


> If I said something really wrong please correct me. And pinheiro
> please add more details if you feel like.

No, I think you did well! :-)


- Nikolaj