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Menu Shadows in GTK2 259

Posted by CmdrTaco from the why-the-heck-not dept.
A user noted that there is a now a gtk shadow patch which does what it says for GTK2 applications. You can see a screenshot, or another or yet another. And if you're lazy, here are some RPMs with the patch. One more piece of eye candy to brighten up your weekend.
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Menu Shadows in GTK2 More

Menu Shadows in GTK2

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  • It shoud be from the... (Score:5, Funny)

    by acxr is wasted ( 653126 ) * on Sunday July 06, 2003 @09:24AM (#6376638)
    save-it-for-a-slow-news-day dept.

  • Save the eye candy (Score:2, Insightful)

    by legcramp ( 681173 )
    I think the Linux community should stop trying to emulate the bloat of XP. What are they smoking? The point of Linux is to be alternative. And if the alternative is the same, looks the same, and takes the same amount of memory to run. Then whats the point? Arg.

    • Re:Save the eye candy (Score:5, Insightful)

      by yobbo ( 324595 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @09:36AM (#6376689)
      It's free.
      • It's also free.

    • Re:Save the eye candy (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kenthorvath ( 225950 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @09:42AM (#6376709)
      And if the alternative is the same, looks the same, and takes the same amount of memory to run. Then whats the point?

      The point is that the alternative isn't the same - it's not proprietary, it's source is open, there are no licensing fees, the community spirit of the developers is reflected in 98% of all software developed for it (iow, it's also open and free). There is an alternative, and it is better.

      Even if there was a 100% compatible open sourced version of WindowsXP that had no licensing cost, which would you use? Now imagine if the "freeXP" had no anti-aliasing, onlyh ran in 8-bit color mode, and looked like Windows 3.1, would you still rather use that than the real McCoy? Emulation of an already successful product is not a bad thing, in many ways GTK has already surpassed MFC, now they are filling in the holes.

      • The point is that the alternative isn't the same

        Surely not, but why all that talk about the look? It isn't the look that makes the difference. To me the design of the underlying system is much more important. I happen to like the Unix design, and the commandline. That was really my reason to start using Linux. The open source was an extra bonus, and I'm surely not going to let go of that. We all know, that sometimes computer systems behave strange. But with Linux I actually have some possibilities to fin
      • And the time would be much better spent making an interface that is efficient. I like to WORK WITH my computer, not look at pretty drop shadows and such. They can be added later, but there is much more that could be done to make a GOOD OOUI. They should NOT be chasing the horrid UI that is windoze. They should be refining and making it more efficient, more consistent. GUI's don't have to be inefficient compared to command line. It's just that everyone keeps #!@#$% copying that M$ pile of dung.

    • Re:Save the eye candy (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Speare ( 84249 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @09:42AM (#6376711) Homepage Journal

      To some people, "alternative" means:

      not spending their money for Microsoft,

      not being vulnerable to viruses made for the mainstream platform,

      has source code available so you can tinker or learn,

      has public bug reporting so bugs you discover have a chance at being fixed,

      experiment more openly with Human-Computer Interface concepts.

      Some people like the look and feel of XP (though I don't). Some people like the product but despise the creator. Some people want to recreate effects they've seen in code, because they wonder if they can reverse-engineer it accurately.

      I saw this and wondered, "what if the mouse pointer were the light source for GUI shadows hanging off menus and window frames; would it be horribly distracting or helpful for tracking the mouse pointer intuitively?" I value experimentation over one-size-fits-all, so that's one reason I choose Linux.

      • > I saw this and wondered, "what if the mouse pointer were the light source for GUI shadows
        > hanging off menus and window frames; would it be horribly distracting or helpful for tracking the
        > mouse pointer intuitively?"

        E-17 had a demo that did exactly this. It looked really cool, and probably would be horribly distracting. I can imagine opening up a menu but then forgetting what you were planning to run because you'd get too caught up in playing with the dynamic shadow effect.

        Of course we're talk
    • "I think the Linux community should stop trying to emulate the bloat of XP."

      They're not trying to emulate the bloat of XP. Nowadays, the company leading GUI development is Apple. They were the first ones to build a well-honed mass-market GUI that has all of the bells and whistles, like anti-aliasing, on-the-fly graphics scaling, and the like. By description, a lot of what they have for just their UI is the same stuff that 3d first person shooters were touting as features, for a while. Microsoft has t
    • Menu shadows are bloat?

      Seriously. Explain how on earth shadow menus could be "bloat." In your obsessive need to feel "alternative" by using Linux, someone adds a feature that other GUI operating systems have had for at least three years, and all you can do is rant and rave about emulation, about your declaration of the "point of Linux," and so forth. Geez, just don't use it then. Remain in your ugly, visual feedback-less fvwm95 environment because it has "no bloat."

      Honestly. Shut up.
    • "I think the Linux community should stop trying to emulate the bloat of XP. What are they smoking? The point of Linux is to be alternative. And if the alternative is the same, looks the same, and takes the same amount of memory to run. Then whats the point? Arg. "

      So... it should be behind then? XP should look like it's a generation ahead of Linux? Brilliant. *eyeroll*

      Menu shadows are helpful, incidentally. They're not going to save the world from alien invaders, but they do provide a nice extra visua

  • Slow news day? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by m00nun1t ( 588082 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @09:32AM (#6376660) Homepage
    If this was a post about Windows getting shadows, there'd be dozens of posts listing the zillion OSes that already have shadows and bitching about Microsoft's lack of innovation.

    When GTK2 gets it, it's cool.

    Such is life.

    • Re:Slow news day? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Tony Hoyle ( 11698 ) <tmh@nodomain.org> on Sunday July 06, 2003 @09:34AM (#6376675) Homepage
      Especially since it's been in KDE since v3 :)

      Old news... yawn.
      • This *is* old news. However, this was implemented as a GTK patch sometime last year, about the same time that it got into KDE 3. Of course, maybe this is officially *stable* now, because I wasn't too pleased with the results when this was first implemented.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • What's your point?
    • What the hell are you smoking? Just look at all the comments! Zillions of posts about how we should not emulate Winodws XP or posts about that Linux doesn't innovate!
      And back when a Slashdot article was posted about XFree86 getting XRandR, there were tons of posts about how XFree86 === Windows 95 and how Windows already had it for years etc. etc.

      And now, somebody like you suddenly jumps in, claims the opposite, and immediately gets modded up to Insightful just because you're not anti-MS. *sigh*
      Slashdot is


      • And now, somebody like you suddenly jumps in, claims the opposite, and immediately gets modded up to Insightful just because you're not anti-MS. *sigh*
        Slashdot is not an anti-MS site anymore! How else do you explain that people like you always get modded up, even though you claim that Slashdot is an anti-MS site?

        People do the oddest things.

        Back when the Browser Wars were just beginning to heat up, I had a friend who was a big fan of IE. He expressed his preference with the zeal of a fan of an under

    • Do you actually read the comments, then?

      It's more like this:
      - GTK has only just got shadows? Windows and MacOS have had this for ages! Linux needs to do better than this!
      - What's the point, it's bloat
      - Linux needs to focus on being more user friendly before worrying about eye candy
      - A few awful jokes ...and maybe the occasional post about how cool it is, or some intelligent discussion about how it's done. But not much.

    • I think you're confused. Slashdot has long since moved on from the anti-MS days. Now most of the comments in stories similar to this one are like yours (that is, anti-anti-MS). Obviously this can regress as far as we want, so a much better way to deal with these sorts of stories is to post if you have something pertinent to say or else just don't post.

    • If this was a post about Windows getting shadows, there'd be dozens of posts listing the zillion OSes that already have shadows and bitching about Microsoft's lack of innovation.

      When GTK2 gets it, it's cool.

      Such is life.

      Actually, last time it got mentioned w.r.t Windows there were people arguing both for and against it. Now, that it's available for GNOME, there are once again people arguing both for and against it. I know it's fun to pretend that Linux advocates are hypocrites, but the reality is t

  • More than visual fluff (Score:5, Insightful)

    by puckhead ( 241973 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @09:34AM (#6376676) Homepage Journal
    Shadows provide a visual clue that should speed up the users analysis of what's happening on the desktop. This isn't earth shattering news but is an improvement.

  • Great! (Score:5, Funny)

    by wfberg ( 24378 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @09:35AM (#6376680)
    Now everybody who uses a mac will switch over immediately!
    • "Now everybody who uses a mac will switch over immediately!"

      Sorry, this just doesn't have the same appeal as the Steve Jobs's Reality Distortion field. Please think of the mock turtle necks and Birkenstock's for Christ's sake!

  • stay tuned... (Score:5, Funny)

    by houseofmore ( 313324 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @09:36AM (#6376687) Homepage
    rpm -i ms-paperclip-1XP.rpm

  • Wow, must be a slow day (Score:4, Interesting)

    by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <`gro.daetsriek' `ta' `todhsals'> on Sunday July 06, 2003 @09:36AM (#6376688)
    GTK gets another feature that KDE has had for over a year. Wait itll they get window shadows in 2005. Will that also make the front page?
    • That's not going to happen for some time. This GTK patch won't be going into the mainstream releases most likely, it was purely a wet-afternoon hack (it's been around for a while btw).

      Proper non-sucky transparency requires support from XFree, which doesn't exist yet. Until then both this unofficial patch and the broken support KDE ships with will just be a quick hack.

    • This has been a patch for about as long as KDE's has been in 3.0. It just wasn't widely known. I used it last year, and frankly, I wasn't too impressed. Just because it isn't implemented into Gnome 2 by default doesn't mean that they didn't have a good reason for leaving it out. Gnome 2/GTK is still more lean than KDE/QT, and I think that they want to keep it that way. It's not that I have a problem with KDE, and the options can be turned off.

      I must agree, though, that this isn't news that is worth ma
    • GTK has nothing to do with window shadows, the WM does them.

      GTK is a GUI API only. If you want window shadows in GNOME (the desktop environment that uses the GTK API), you need a WM that supports them, so suggest window shadows to the sawfish and the metacity teams, since those two are the WM's most commonly used with GNOME.

  • Hmmmm, might be bad. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Krapangor ( 533950 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @09:38AM (#6376696) Homepage
    My experience with shadow dropping menus is that the overall usuabily and visual quality degenerates. The underlying text structures are worse to read and after 16 hours in front of the screen your eyes start to hurt. And it seems to me that it reduces the menu contrast, which I personally don't like, too.
    It's rather strange that people always want to add this feature. In real live you wouldn't read a news paper in blinding sunlight just to see the pages drop a shadow, would you ?

    • > My experience with shadow dropping menus is that the overall usuabily and visual quality degenerates. The underlying text structures are worse to read and after 16 hours in front of the screen your eyes start to hurt. And it seems to me that it reduces the menu contrast, which I personally don't like, too.
      > It's rather strange that people always want to add this feature. In real live you wouldn't read a news paper in blinding sunlight just to see the pages drop a shadow, would you ?

      Related notio

      • Unfortunately, that's exactly what antialiasing is designed to do, to "smooth out" the sharp changes between light and dark to disguise individual pixels. If you have good eyesight and a high-resultion display, antialiasing makes things look blurred.
        • You hit a point where AA is absolutely critical. My screen is very high res (133 dpi). non-AA text looks absolutely terrible, because most hinting algorithms make strokes 1 pixel wide, which is nearly invisible on my screen. Most AA algorithms, on the other hand, try to preserve the actual shape of the letters. This results in strokes being at least a couple of pixels thick, which makes things look very nice. The gray pixels used to do the AA are so small, you can't see it unless you look really close. For

    • Re:Hmmmm, might be bad. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by archen ( 447353 )
      After 16 yours you should be taking a break anyway. The amount of eye strain you are probably experiencing is likely hurting your vision. I somehow doubt you look away from the screen every 15 minutes or so like your supposed to either (but who does that anyway? :) . I don't really see how this would make things that much harder to see than say, making an application look "3d" instead of strait black lines.

      I think if there is any tragedy in Linux eyestrain it's anti-aliasing fonts, where I get the cho

      • Re:Hmmmm, might be bad. (Score:3, Informative)

        by cowbutt ( 21077 )
        Sounds like you need to either try some better fonts (The Bitstream Vera series are good) and/or recompile Freetype with the bytecode interpreter enabled. Most distros ship with the code disabled as it may have patent liabilities.

        --

    • I like drop shadows like this since I actually think they more clearly separates the meny from the background that can just as well be filled with text and other GUI widgets. I think drop shadows help against that problem by improving the menu outline.

      I'm not sure where the "read news paper in blinding sunlight" comes in, and how I would possible be able to compare a menu with a newspaper. First, my computer screen isn't using a contrast comparable to blinding sunlight. :-)
    • I suspect you're a victim of bad implementation more than anything else.

      The shadows in OS X don't suffer from the problem of 'overall usability and visual quality degenerates'

      Shadows are subtle, and you won't notice them unless you look for them, but they do make it so you can *easily* see the difference between foreground and background windows, since each window has a different depth shadow. Not only that, but shadows composite, so that when two window shadows overlap, they do get darker as you would ex

    • A Drop Shadows Is a Great UI Cue (Score:5, Interesting)

      by EXTomar ( 78739 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @01:17PM (#6377665)
      Drop Shadows are simply a great UI indication of "depth" and "boundry". I wish more UI primatives had it. Given a jumble of rectangles which one is the top most? So far the answer has been to highlight or focus the top one differently than the others (ie. title bar is a different color to stand out from the rest which may not work if your focus is different than your top most). Drop Shadows enhances this distinction since your brain has already been looking for the most contiguous rectange and assuming that is the top most. Sometimes that is hard to spot but things like Drop Shadows can help flag where windows end and at a glance show their stacking order.

      Its great that UIs have Drop Shadows but I wonder why they aren't applied to even more primatives? Why don't entire windows have drop shadows?
    • I don't have menu shadows and the only thing I get after 16 hours in front of the screen is blood clots in my leg, which migrate to my lungs and kill me. This has happened four or five times now. I believe my GUI windowing system is to blame.

  • QT had shadows last year (Score:5, Interesting)

    by salimfadhley ( 565599 ) <ip@@@stodge...org> on Sunday July 06, 2003 @09:39AM (#6376699) Homepage Journal
    KDE had shadowed windows and menus a long time ago (at least it did on my distribution) - shouldnt the title of this article read

    "GTK/Gnome finally catches up by implementing usless feature copied from OSX"

    Yes, shadows are nice - they stop windows smelging into each other... but this is so NOT NEWS.
    • I dunno, I feel as though I got something useful out of this article. I learned a new word, "smelging" for one.

    • Re:QT had shadows last year (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mcgroarty ( 633843 ) <brian@mcgroarty.gmail@com> on Sunday July 06, 2003 @10:18AM (#6376837) Homepage
      "GTK/Gnome finally catches up by implementing usless feature copied from OSX"

      Yes, shadows are nice - they stop windows smelging into each other... but this is so NOT NEWS.

      Windows had it before the Mac, there was a hack to do it with Amiga Workbench before that, and it was in countless Hollywood computer displays before that, etc.

      It's a slow news day, this does look kind of cool, and there are going to be people who enjoy it. Meanwhile, you spent an order of magnitude longer in complaining about the article than you would have in just skipping past, so -- what's your point?

      • The old DOS library C-Worthy provided shadowing on old DOS applications (other libraries provided this as well). Before that God equipped every thing on the Earth with a nice shadow to keep everything from blending together. It's not like Windows, Mac, KDE, Gnome, etc invented shadows.
    • "GTK/Gnome finally catches up by implementing usless feature copied from OSX"

      OSX did not pioneer the use of shadows in user interfaces; it is actually decades old.

  • I'm not so sure... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nepheles ( 642829 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @09:40AM (#6376702) Homepage
    It might be of more benefit to everyone if the GTK people focussed instead on overall useability, which is lacking in many places. Once the interface is as refined as, say, that of OS X, we can concentrate on the eye-candy.


    • > It might be of more benefit to everyone if the GTK people focussed instead on overall useability, which is lacking in many places. Once the interface is as refined as, say, that of OS X, we can concentrate on the eye-candy.

      While I don't dispute the underlying sentiment, wouldn't that actually be an issue for the appplication people rather than the GTK people? Aren't there enough people hacking on FOSS software that individuals can afford to scratch an itch?

  • It looks good. I wonder if it will become part of the next stable release of GNOME.

  • One and for ALL!!! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    KDE == Window Manager

    GTK == GUI tool kit

    you may consider comparing QT with GTK instead of "KDE with GTK"

    WOW! If this isn't insightful!!!

    • Allright asswipes, let's get this straight:

      It IS correct to compare C++ with KDE
      It is NOT correct to compare Qt with Quicktime
      It IS correct to compare KWin with DOS
      It is NOT correct to compare Gcc with VC++
      It IS correct to compare the Lindberg baby with Monica Lewinsky
      It is NOT correct to compare Kato Kaelin with a white Ford Bronco
      It IS correct to compare herpies with Apples (if you are an Orange)
      It is NOT correct to compare Bill Gates with a philanthropist

      Does that clear this mess up for everyone?!?

  • Linux XP (Score:4, Funny)

    by bazik ( 672335 ) <bazik AT gentoo DOT org> on Sunday July 06, 2003 @09:53AM (#6376751) Homepage Journal
    One more step towards Linux XP [tuxfiles.org] ;)

  • Wow!!! SHADOWED menus??? I can just feel my productivity being enhanced already! This will probably be the killer feature pushing forward Linux on the corporate desktop!!!

    Soon we'll have a shadowed mouse cursor, almost guaranteeing Linux's adoption by the pointy haired manager types. The future is now!

  • Comments (Score:5, Informative)

    by big.ears ( 136789 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @10:10AM (#6376804) Homepage
    • This patch has been around for months. The latest bugfix release was two weeks ago. This didn't just happen, and I'm surprised to read it here as news.
    • For those of you who are waiting to get it into your distro, don't hold your breath. It is a self-proclaimed ugly hack that works reasonably well but will not be part of the main GTK. But, a similar hack is used for QT/KDE, which gives you an idea of where GTK hackers priorities are. You'll have to wait until true alpha transparency makes it into X for this done right.
    • Despite the many comments about this just being eye-candy, this probably benefits usability as well (like Anti-Aliasing). Shadow is an important depth cue, which helps segregate the menu from the background. This probably makes it slightly easier and faster to find the proper menu item (tens or hundreds of ms), which over a lifetime or across an organization can add up to some real money.
    • I don't think anyone would argue that shadowing really is more than simply eye candy. On the gripping hand, there really are far more important things that effort could be going into.

      One of the greatest benefits of open-source, that each person can work on what they want to when they want to, is also one of it's biggest failings: stated another way, it's just an unorganized mess. I have to say, it's amazing that it works as well as it does!

  • Great (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Maybe someday they will actually have a usable file selector dialog as well.

    Yes I know its not fair to point out one little thing someone worked on and complain why X wasn't done first, but really there are certain things that REALLY need to get done first.

    Like how the Gnome project continues to not fix the basic flaws in Nautilus. I mean really this thing does everything but manage files well. They keep adding more and more eyecandy and yet when you do something basic like browse a remotely mounted direc
    • You do realize that the Ximian file selector comes with this patch right? It has the Home, Desktop, and Network shortcuts on the left, etc. etc.

  • Lots of posts say this is a wasteful development etc. I am a KDE user (since 2.2) and I find this incredibly useful.

    As a rule, I use very little eye-candy, I prefer a subdued looking desktop. I turn off all that whiz-bang borrowed-from-Apple features like gleaming scroll-bars,flashy window decorations etc.

    However, these little changes like font smoothing,sub-pixel rendering(cleartype),and menu hinting make KDE a lot more useful.

    Specifically, the Dotnet style [kde-look.org].

    Nice to see this turn up in Gtk/Gnome.

  • This is exactly what Linux needs to overtake Windows! Now it's only a matter of time!

    This was newsworthy how? Maybe I just need more coffee.

  • Great, another GTK appearance option (long). (Score:4, Interesting)

    by aussersterne ( 212916 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @11:35AM (#6377147) Homepage
    Is there anywhere out there a configuration applet for GTK2? You know, something to configure the colors and fonts and manage odd things like drop shadows for menus without having to choose somebody else's idea of a nice desktop in a pre-built theme?

    As a longtime KDE user, I'm used to just popping up the control center and configuring such things. KDE has always somehow taken care of the GTK applications' appearances as well. Some recent GTK2 applications, however (i.e. Ximan Evolution) began ignoring KDE's configuration. I got rather tired of seeing these sticking out like a sore thumb on my desktop and decided it was time to configure them to match my colors and fonts using a native GTK tool, instead of "cheating" by using KDE to configure my GTK applications.

    Ummmm, where to start, that was the question.

    I couldn't find anything but the theme selector in Red Hat 9's GNOME desktop. That let me choose other people's ideas of a nice desktop, but not my own. I tried the old "gnomecc" tool from the command line, but it wasn't there. Finally using an strace I figured out that the appearance of gtk was controlled in .gtkrc.mine and .gtkrc-2.0.mine. Great! Apparently this is how KDE controls the appearance of GTK applications -- it edits these files for me. But now some applications are not getting the hint properly. Okay, I'll edit the files by hand, no problem. I looked at the existing files... Not so great. Not intuitive.

    Color format looks like the odd (0-1,0-1,0-1) tuple used by some GTK apps (notably The GIMP) in alternate color palette dialogs. I start up the GIMP and start trying to construct matching colors using that format, and then inserting them into .gtkrc-2.0.mine. After changing a few of the color options by trial and error, more gtk2 widgets do indeed match my KDE colors. Unfortunately, many do not, and the font still sucks.

    Since there's nothing helpful in the .gtkrc and .gtkrc-2.0 files themselves, I start looking around for documentation. Back in the old days, X Resources for dotfiles were always documented in application manual pages. Maybe GTK apps do the same thing?

    No dice.

    So I get on to Google Groups and start looking. I find references to a file at gtk.org. Pretty soon I am digging through this little gem [gnome.org] at developer.gnome.org, among others.

    I couldn't believe that changing the appearance for a few GTK applications was orders of magnitude more complex and user-unfriendly than editing my old .Xdefaults or .XResources files had been. After another hour or so of studying, and some more trial-and-error, I was finally able to get my GTK2 applications to completely match my simple KDE colors and fonts -- which had taken me all of two minutes to select when I chose them way back in the KDE2 days and which I've been using ever since.

    So... now we have GTK2 drop-shadows... Who the hell will ever figure out how to turn them on? Before we add yet more GTK2 appearance options, wouldn't it be prudent to get an application into GNOME to configure them all? Is there already one (other than KDE control center, which doesn't yet seem to completely work with GTK2) and I've just missed it?

    In any case, for a while after Red Hat 9 came out I wondered if there was any real reason I was using KDE over GNOME... This episode gave me my answer!
    • Somebody was working on a colour theme control applet for Gnome2, but I haven't heard anything about it for a while.

      There isn't really great demand for it. If you want consistancy in your desktop, you're already using BlueCurve/Galaxy/Geramik etc, which do colours for you.

      Setting GTKs colours, themes, fonts and so on should be done via XSETTINGS. Unfortunately the lack of a standardised colour format prevents this from happening currently, believe me, I'd like it too as then Wine and KDE could sync to *


    • Well, if you really want to make your GTK/GTK2 apps look like QT apps (colors, fonts, widgets) use the QTCurve or Geramik themes. They're QT/GTK/GTK2 themes that read your QT/KDE configs and make GTK apps use the QT/KDE prefs.

      So, basically, you can use the KDE Control Center to configure your GTK apps. Nice stuff that.

  • yeah, great, thanks (Score:3, Funny)

    by CySurflex ( 564206 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @12:53PM (#6377494)
    Great- you just made me notice that my Windows XP menus has shadows. I don't know how long its been there, but now it's disturbing me and I want the shadow OFF!!! Thanks a lot slashdot.

  • Quit Trolling (Score:5, Informative)

    by erikharrison ( 633719 ) on Sunday July 06, 2003 @02:14PM (#6377961)

    You know, at this point it's probably not worth posting this, but . . .

    For all of you trolling out there about how GNOME should get off it's ass and fix this or that before resorting to implementing this sort of eye candy, or for those of you trolling that KDE had this first, a couple of facts:

    • This was not done by a GNOME developer, or is in any way part of the GNOME project. This was done by Olivier Fourdan, the head developer of the second most popular GTK+ based desktop environment, XFce [1].
    • Drop shadows in X11 are a hack, Qt or GTK+. Hack, hack, hack. No alpha blending.
    • Olivier know's it's a hack. And that is why he did it. It was fun. It was a side trek from his over a year of work on the GTK+ 2 rewrite of XFce. It will not be a part of the standard GTK+. It does class up my desktop however, so I like it.

    -Erik

    [1] Yes, there are DE's other than GNOME or KDE. XFce (xfce.org) is currently finishing up it's GTK+ 2 development branch, XFce4 (it's in BETA 2). ROX (rox.sf.net) just finished it's GTK+ 2 branch. Wanna good winning combo, to have the best of 3 worlds? Take GNOME, replace Metacity with XFce4's window manager (xfwm), replace Nautilus with ROX's file manager (ROX-Filer), and be amazed.

  • Just what I need in my gtk... One of the worst features of windows. =)
    What will they come up with next? Bluescreens at kernel panic?
  • Why don't they focus on making GTK lightweight and consistent first? I mean, OS/2's WPS ran on 486's with 16MB of ram or less, and GTK apps and the like STILL don't have the intuitive object oriented design enjoyed way back in the early 90's.

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