A small post for a not so small screenshot .
If you are that type of user that uses KDE from trunk them this might not be new to you, but for the rest of the world here goes a screenshot showing some of the stuff Hugo Pereira and I have been working on in Oxygen windeco.
Anew color theme that might work better on some less optimal screens, the windeco is now much more configurable and you can set its to be extremely thin or bigger if you so desire, the active glow as been improved, we have new windec buttons that have better contrast and great animation effects.
If you can build oxygen windeco from trunk please have a test go with it for a few days and tell us what you think of it.
Anew color theme that might work better on some less optimal screens, the windeco is now much more configurable and you can set its to be extremely thin or bigger if you so desire, the active glow as been improved, we have new windec buttons that have better contrast and great animation effects.
If you can build oxygen windeco from trunk please have a test go with it for a few days and tell us what you think of it.
Comments
- I am interested in technical stuff (how it works better? what awful quality displays are we talking about? and the shortcomings of oxygen default grey color scheme on said monitors?) and if it's demonstrated on the screenshot?
I have always thought that if you want something to look less shitty on a wide range of displays available to consumer you go with more neutral tones, no?
Btw., when you put up that poll on your website about what you should focus on for 4.4, I voted for windeco, because I was hoping for exactly this: smaller title bars and slicker windeco buttons.
I am so happy! :)
I, however, strongly support JC's comment regarding the blue glow. IMHO the bright blue line around the window is absolutely perfect, but the rest of the glow ends in a strange and way too harsh way.
I've never really like this air-clock either, especially compared to the gorgeous black one that was used before, but that's not really the subject of this blog post I guess :p
Great work anyway! I really have to talk about you to my head of marketing, our company's logo needs some love.
The buttons look much smoother than before, which works quite nicely with the rest. Will have to check out the animations anytime soon
Oh, and it does look better without the racing stripes in the title bar..
Oxygen is looking already incredible.
I think the new buttons are awesome and really gives more contrast. Why not making it with the buttons of the theme itself too?
I know hugo is working on some nice animations (already great on nitrogen theme). Keep up the excellent work guys.
One thing I think really need some love is the "blue" glow, but not of the window, but on the widgets themselves. Now it is not that polish yet (On some widgets,like an edit box, they are just a blue line). Take this mockup of yours as example:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/__JNFVYfijS4/RnLgXQrK8JI/AAAAAAAAAGc/5dWv2oYi9aM/s1600-h/rect3364.png
If the glow was half this beautiful, that would be great.
Guys, you rock, oxygen is a very beautiful theme and will be even better when those animations are ready!
The stripes are gone by default now? They're the absolute most ugly part of Oxygen, in my opinion. :P
Anyway, great work!
@Anonymous: [off topic]
I prefer the Air clock to the Oxygen one, but the hour hand should be made shorter (slightly shorter than the radius of the white, opaque circle) methinks.
as a side note. a frient of mine admired the air clock, but noticed that the knop from 10 o'clock is wrong illuminated. the light comes from the left instead of the top.
The only complain I have -- and I've seen many encores on the internet -- that KDE4 now needs a common theme setting for plasma and styles. So, if plasma has transparency, so should the windeco automatically etc.
And to get different sized windeco and buttons, I have used the Nitrogen windecoration from http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Nitrogen?content=99551
And what I really hate on Oxygen, is that there is no good way to actually control the shadow. The KWin Shadow effect plugin works great all other decorations. But with KWin it really is bad loogin because the shadow is forced to active decoration.
And I have get answered that the shadow plugin is being removed and get all other windecos forced the Oxygen decoration format where the decoration itself takes care of shadow independently and not by the KWin effects.
I do not like the idea at all. I like to control the Windeco transparency myself, not by the plasma theme.
I do not like partically transparent windecos but solid ones, like on Oxygen/Nitrogen/etc.
But what I hope, is that we get the ARGB support soon for KWin and KDE styles so we can get class themes if people wants. More like Windows Vista/7 Aero.
/izo\
@hias the svg's used in the clock are still static to wen they revolve the glows revolve also.
So, thanks to your screenshot i installed that oxygen windeco on my KDE 4.3.2. I don't know if it was supposed to work on KDE 4.3, but getting the files from svn and building didn't work for me. So i had to hack some things to make it work.
1) downloaded the windeco from the svn (svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/kwin/clients/oxygen
)
2) changed all the oxygen and Oxygen references to nitrogen and Nitrogen (i mean, the class, methods and file names). That way it will not conflict with the KDE 4.3 default oxygen windeco files.
3) Build the windeco as usual. I got an error during 'cmake' on the CMakeLists.txt (i don't know why), so i replaced this file with the CMakeLists.txt of the Nitrogen windeco (from kde-look.org).
4) I got an error when doing 'make' on nitrogenclient.cpp ("SettingCompositing" not defined), so i commented out everything inside the "NitrogenClient::reset( unsigned long changed )" method.
5) make && make install. Done :)
I just have one question: where did you got that nice wallpaper? :)
Cumprimentos
One thing that I always felt about those buttons of the windeco is that the minimize should be (suppose this way -> is up) >< instead of just < and maximize should start has <> instead of > because, when you have your taskbar on the top of the screen, has I usually have (and probably will untill the mac-style bar or raptor appears), it gets very confusing to press a single up arrow to maximize and a single down arrow to minimize. It just feels wrong :P
Thanks for making it this far,
Kiberlynx
I really like the new Glow, looks very decent and integrated to me.
At the opposite I now find the new windeco-buttons somewhat strange and displaced looking, something as they wouldn't really belong to the windeco.
I think its because they are not embedded anymore, they seem to be at an different layer ... at least from a visual perspective.
So I would like to see these buttons reverted back to the current ones whicht seem perfect to me. Or, if not possible or wanted, please add at least an option to the windeco-configuration with the current (4.3)-buttons as an option.
Btw. did you change the gradient from windeco to window? It looks so 'flat' now .... :(
The new look is more nice and user friendly.
Keep on work...
In the current KDE-4.3 oxygen it's almost impossible to see whether it's on or off. Which makes the whole windeco unusable for me.
If you can go and test it think its brilliant fix, simple and effective....
I believe Oxygen heads to the right way!
But air is still weak.
The colors on the panels just don't fit well... :-(.
I believe that still Oxygen plasma theme is better...
My wallpaper on the side has ony one color http://windows7wallpapers.net/thumbs/planet_tux_wallpaper_linux_the_world_is_free_like_open_source-t2.jpg
leading to an ugly transparency.
I think if you remove the diagonal white strips from the panel, it would be better to this occasion as well as when you are not able to activate special effects.
Instead it would be nice to have the circles there. - Just a thought.
What you said about the buttons on the titlebar is exactly what I wanted to say.
you're my hero :)
The blue glow looks unprofessional and blue doesn't really combine with white or gray.
Thats exactly what I was searching in this time...
Thanks!!!
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