Greetings to the p.g.o-readers and fellow gnome-hackers
Argl, I almost forgot… now that my blog is aggregated on p.g.o I guess I just give a quick hello to everybody.
I finished a patch for compiz (against CVS-head of today) to allow the color of the drop-shadow to be set. The patch was sent to the compiz mailing-list too. I’ll see if it gets accepted or not. Meanwhile here’s another screenshot of it in action along with gconf-editor showing the new option for the decoration-plugin:
“Pimp my ride!” (click for high-res)
April 25th, 2006 at 11:59 pm
Very nice stuff Mirco, nice to see a so interesting plugin.
Do you know if a plugin to set the width of dropshadow already exists ?
Thanks for your nice job, really.
April 26th, 2006 at 12:06 am
I’m not sure I’d use it, but I love the idea.
April 26th, 2006 at 12:28 am
@Taku: It’s not a plugin in itself… it’s just a patch to extend the decoration plugin, to which David Reveman just recently added custom drop-shadow support.
@Jeremy: To be totally honest… I don’t use the drop-shadows colored that way myself. I stick with plain black. It is just that there are people, who are far more color-sensitive and would like to be able to tweak the drop-shadows to fit a special color-scheme or tint in their used theme. For those folks I hope the patch is helpful.
April 26th, 2006 at 12:31 am
May I sugest different shadow sizes? Not just custom ones, but different for some behaviors, like windows from the same active app cast smaller (or larger) shadows than the innactive ones?
Maybe we can add colours too the mix too (but let’s not create a rainbow, just some small shading variation from app to app), but the idea is to help user visualization of different apps’ windows.
April 26th, 2006 at 2:05 am
It looks awesome. I was wondering though, since all the windows are getting such a nice facelift, is it possible to do anything to the gnome panel? It seems that that’s the only thing that’s still looking kinda tasteless.
April 26th, 2006 at 7:10 am
That’s nice. It could be useful for a few things:
1) Use red drop shadows for important system warnings. That’s not that cool because such warnings are not meant to exist anyway. Maybe more interesting would be…
2) Use a different color for windows running as another user. For example, if I start an admin tool with root priviligies that windows would use a different color for the shadow.
I completely agree JrezIN’s idea of using a different shadow for the active window.
In addition to belal1’s comment, not only the panel but gnome-terminal could use real transparencies when a real CM is running.
April 26th, 2006 at 9:02 am
@Jefferson: You’re right. Having the drop-shadows attributes be defined on a per-window-type or application-basis would be a good extension. But this is a bit more involved (compared to just adding tweakable shadow-color) thus I did not go for that right form the start.
@belal1: There’s almost anything possible
But I have no idea what the gnome-panel maintainers might have up their sleeves.
@rosa: I know that there is someone hacking on gnome-terminal or rather vte to add real transparency.
April 26th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
@rosa: Good idea too! Perhaps a different window decoration for other users’ process may be better in terms of usability, but I totally agree with the idea of coloured shadows for warnings, and other kinds of pop-ups/notifications!
@MacSlow: That’s ok! I hope somehow in the future these features became available… thanks! =]
April 26th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
20 years after the chernobyl catastrophe, gnome windows start to glow. This can’t be a coincidence!
April 26th, 2006 at 6:10 pm
Oh, what app is that analog clock? And which applet displays the sensor temperatures? I only seem to find ugly ones…
TIA, Colin
April 26th, 2006 at 6:20 pm
Its good to know that even an UBER LEET hacker like MacSlow needs to Google something like "create a patch with diff" every now and then. =)
Awesome work!
April 26th, 2006 at 7:01 pm
@Colin: Take a look here http://macslow.thepimp.net/?page_id=23
@stu: Embarrassing isn’t it?! Maybe now after being exposed to ridicule like this, that teaches me to remember diff -Naur old new >patch.txt from now on (note to myself: cross-check screenshots intended to go on public display for painfulness better next time
) BTW, I’m much better in applying patches. So much for "ueber leet" 
April 27th, 2006 at 11:39 am
Suse users using my rpms are now using this patch. Its defaulted to #000, but hey you never know someone might like pink shadows.
May 8th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
Hi!
Well done with the drop shadow stuff. I am also a big fan of the cairo clock
I was just wondering if you could post those SVGs you have on your desktop or maybe a link to where they (and many more?) came from.
Milamber
May 8th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
@Milamber: There’s just the zen.svg which is an extracted bit from the zen-theme for cairo-clock.
January 17th, 2009 at 10:29 am
Thanks for the info, works great!