Enhancing the colour schemes [was: Re: sane defaults (security icons)]

[Scott Wheeler]

On Monday 17 January 2005 14:00, Anders Lund wrote:
> Sometimes the system colors just doesn't do. I recently added a feature to
> kate which shades the background of used documents in the Document List, so
> that it is easy to spot the most recent modified/viewed documents. I can't
> use system colors, because there is no colors that can safely fill the
> needs. So I chose to set defaults that work with the default color scheme
> used by KDE, and make the colors configurable (as well as the feature can
> be turned off completely).

One of the things that I often do there is to compute a color based on stuff 
that's in the default schemes.  Basic RGB math is pretty easy, and seems to 
work out well.

For example JuK highlights the playing item by setting it to use a different 
background color.  Instead of adding a new color I just blend the default 
background and the selection color.  While I don't doubt that I could produce 
a color scheme for which this was less than ideal, in practice I've not 
gotten a single complaint about such since it was added a couple years back.

-Scott

-- 
I hear that if you play the Windows XP CD backwards, you get a satanic message
"That's nothing. If you play it forward, it installs Windows XP!"