digiclock looks

[todd rme]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Sebastian Kügler <sebas at kde.org> wrote:
> Hey friends,
>
> With all the shininess in the panel, the clock is starting to look more and
> more out of place. (In fact, I got annoyed when reading a Plasma 4.5 review in
> a linux mag mentioning that the clocks now looks "even more oudated" with the
> new system tray -- all this beauty is just creating extra work :P). So I
> played around with an idea of adding a slight emboss effect to it, similar to
> what Hugo does in the Window title. The main time is also painted in a
> slightly translucent black (or rather text color), so it doesn't jump out
> quite so much, blending in better with the system tray's icons. I think it
> already looks a bit better -- though not perfect yet. (My effect might even be
> overdoing it a  little, but that can surely be tweaked.) I've only quickly
> checked if it works with white-on-black themes as well, and that seems to be
> the case (althogh the emboss effect is not visible because it's painted in
> translucent black on black, still the white of the clock doesn't shout for as
> much attention anymore.
>
> What do you think of this? I've attached my current patch in case you feel
> like tweaking the values a bit. It's a rather simple patch, we basically paint
> the time twice, once in "fairly translucent white" (of course taken from the
> theme), once in a translucent version of the foreground color (usually black).
> I've added a teeny-tiny bit of translucency here as well to make it look a
> little lighter, so it's not those thick black letters.
>
> I'd like to invite feedback how to improve it further, and comments on this
> idea.

Wow, that looks really good!  A couple of things:

I think the affect is a bit overdone, especially in the oxygen theme.
You don't want it to jump out too much, but you also don't want it to
take too much effort for someone to pick it out from the background,
either.  I personally have trouble picking out the new clock in oxygen
without some focus, while in all other pictures (new and old) it jumps
out at me so I can read it at a glance.

Can you post some screenshots of how it looks when it isn't in a panel?

Are you sure embossed is the right effect?  I personally think a
sunken look would be better, especially with the panel looking like it
is convex.  If it isn't too much trouble, screenshots of both for
comparison might be good.

Is there any way to make it so themes can specify whether it embossed,
sunken, or flush?  Some themes, like ASCII or ghost, would probably
look better without the effect.  Maybe they can specify the colors for
emboss/sinking as well.  You might even be able to make it
configurable on a per-widget basis, but I am not sure you want another
config option.

-Todd