KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/containments/folderview

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday 25 May 2008, Marco Martin wrote:
> On Saturday 24 May 2008, Riccardo Iaconelli wrote:
> > That's art issue, I don't want to sound harsh... but it's not really his
> > field. =)

i don't know how to put this kindly. the current artwork in plasma is really 
not that good.

now, you're right that i'm not an artist in that i'm not someone who can fire 
up inkscape and draw something. however, i have an aesthetic sense and i've 
been involved in more than a few corporate projects (both as participant as 
well as in a directorial role). 

now, i've been sitting back hoping that someone with some real aesthetic sense 
would actually step up and start playing art director.

because that's really what's needed: someone to provide some visual design 
that can step above the "hm... this one particular widget over here needs 
this particular tweak" mentality and start thinking of the whole.

it'd be a lot less work than maintianing the current patchwork or art we have 
right now.

it would also require the ability to think about things from an interaction 
perspective. Sebas already covered the interaction implications of this 
particular change. that's the kind of thought that needs to augment the 
aesthetic sensibilities.

> > Plus, we're currently redoing that background...
>
> yeah, the new background (at least the last iteration i know of) is very
> black and very opaque ond loooks really nice also because of that.

great, we're heading further in the direction of ugly. i'm really not sure at 
what point someone thought that using a mostly black screen would be 
something everyone would think is cool. this isn't a turtleneck sweater and 
this isn't a beatnick party.

> for most of the applets, especially those myth much text a theme like
> glassified that is very transparent is simply a no-no, not enough contrast
> and well, it looks odd.

with a more translucent background (it's not transparent, btw) one relies on 
the wallpaper more.

but, low and behold, we've been relying on wallpapers for.. how long now? 
right: for ever. to be able to read icon texts.

what *would* be better is if we could have some nice (performant) bluring 
done, but we won't get that in 4.1 due to some odd limitations in Qt.

> i am for a transparent background just for this applet with this
> http://reviewboard.vidsolbach.de/r/17/
> (temporary ugly artwork but that's the concept)

this is at least better. i'm still not impressed, so i don't expect users to 
be either, but it gives us something more than transparency.

> or,  maybe even better using that background for a certain category of
> applets (let's say big, with more graphics than text) with something like
> setBackgroundHints(Applet::LightBackground) so the applet class loads
> another svg
> how does that sounds?

marginally better.

it all smacks of "throw darts at the solution board and see what we hit" 
though. it also smacks of "yeah, it's an artwork issue, but let's solve it 
with more code."

mostly i'm just very disapointed that this particular change made it into the 
code base. if it isn't out before i leave for my flight tomorrow, i will be 
removing it directly myself.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 194 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/panel-devel/attachments/20080525/1e80691f/attachment.pgp