plasma, panels, colours

[Nuno Pinheiro]

A Friday 07 November 2008 00:22:24, Aaron J. Seigo escreveu:
> hi all...
>
> it was mentioned on irc that the new taskbar styling made it difficult to
> see the active window. but when i looked at the svg, the different was
> pretty apparent ... it was just hard to see o the black background of the
> panel.
>
> so i quickly editted panel-background.svg, tweaked the colours file and got
> this:
>
> 	http://plasma.kde.org/media/light_coloured_panel.png

i will prefer just to make active more diferent and maybe make the bg more 
trasnparent... that will work..

>
> well, almost ..
>
> i also had to go in and tweak the colours that the tasks widget was using
> for the text, since i had to change the other text usage to something dark.
>
> (and ok, the choice of colour in the panel there isn't great, but you get
> the idea)
>
> it's really a lot more appealing with a non-black background. it could
> still even be a dark colour, but i really don't know how many distros are
> going to keep with the default theme when the default is, well, rather
> bleak.

The more I look at distros the more I'm positive they have no idea...
mandriva simply sucked... and  opensuse didnt look any beter...


> i was hoping of putting this off until 4.3, but i'm increasingly thinking
> that waiting is not only unnecessary but also problematic.

I think 4.3 is a good date to a major revamp to the style.

> it's unnecessary to wait because it really means just changing the
> background svg's. that means it' spossible to do with fairly small amounts
> of artwork effort. everything else looks really nice on a light background:
> the new tasks, the new system tray, the panel cashew, etc..
>
> but more drastically, waiting may be problematic because i had to make that
> text colour change.
>
> and more importantly ... it still isn't perfect.
>
> i'm wondering if we might not need a different way to define and retrieve
> colours.
>
> i went with KColorScheme because it was part of kdelibs. but the semantics
> of it aren't quite right for plasma, i think, and we're going to continue
> mapping more and more plasma contexts to KColorScheme colours, and that's
> really where it breaks down hard.
>
> the taskbar may want light text colours; the pager may want dark text
> colours, but only when it's using NoBackground; when it's on a
> StandardBackground, perhaps it needs light colours. etc. ...
>
> i haven't really come up with a firm solution yet, but it's something we
> need to think about because it may well impact the API of Plasma::Theme,
> which means it needs to be done before 4.2.0 is out if we want to do it at
> all.
>
> i'm leaning towards coming up with a list of all the semnatic contexts we
> can identify, find some way to tie the applet context into it and then mate
> all that to classes in libplasma.
>
> one possibility is a Plasma::Colors class which cooperates with
> Plasma::Theme in the background and takes a Plasma::Applet. it could take
> care of all config caching as well as semantic<->config value matching
> necessary.
>
> now, i'm not sure i'm the best one to come up with such a list of colour
> contexts. mostly because, you know, i'm not an artist =P but i'm willing to
> write the code once we agree on a solution, have a list of colour contexts
> and a sample set of colours to work with.
>
> thoughts?

Basacly I dont agrea with another color base on the pannel unless we redo the 
intire theme... this is my opinion.

IM not sure I undrstod what you ment by seting up a set of colors  by code 
that would be applied to the theme? If so i tend to think its a bad idea...


here are a couple of alternatives please have a look. 
 
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/test/



-- 
Oxygen coordinator