new panel look and feel

Marco Martin notmart at gmail.com
Fri Apr 18 11:08:48 CEST 2008


Hi all,
as you may know, me and pinheiro are working on making a brand new look and 
feel for the panel, where the concept he is drawing is like he said on his 
message is this:
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/image7407.png

now, in order to make it happen in a proper way, simply slapping a new svg 
theme isn't enough, some of the polishments we have in mind simply can't be 
done now, so we need some technical changes, i have written them down at the 
wiki page
http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=User:Mart/PanelThemingTodo
i'm pasting it here so it's easier to discuss:

* two different svg element should be loaded by SvgPanel if the panel has a 
100% width/height or not, because they need to use different illumination 
effects to look good
** another elementPrefix could be used or (i prefer) simply used the one 
without prefixes, that will also be used as fallback when north, south etc 
prefixes are not available
This is the easy part, i will implement it right now if there aren't 
objections


* tasks should draw their background with PanelSvg and there should be some 
sort of transition effect between two svgs when the task goes active/hovered
** maybe could it become too memory consuming?
** since complex transitions compositions probably are still far two PanelSvg 
will be needed that blend into each other
** elements we will probably need: active, inactive, iconified and requesting 
attention, each one with a normal and a mouse over version
*** maybe pixmap coloring for mouse over effects would be enough for now?
*** animation would only be needed for transition between mouse over and not 
for now, maybe other transitions will be implemented when we will have more 
complex timelines, like discussed with aaron and bibr at tokamak


*systray should be able to draw a svg background too
** will also be a panelsvg but simpler without fancy animation effects

* Desktop containment should be able to draw shadows for the panel views
** shadows should not be done with the main panel svg (unlike the applet 
background we have now)
** still to be decided: using kwin compositing when available?
** how to draw a shadow on the desktop? it should be aware of other views, so 
maybe it could break the model/view concept :(
** should be used a svg, manually painted with qpainter or used a blurring 
function?

* also breaking the model/view stuff, the panel containment should be able to 
set the shaped mask of the panelview window and this could make the panel 
autohiding harder to do

Cheers,
Marco Martin


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