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Andrea Cimitan, GNOME theme designer and author of the Murrine GTK theme engine, has implement transparent widget support to GTK, allowing for Vista-like transparencies for windows, buttons, etc.
Ars explains that the implementation was done by adding RGBA maps to the theme engine and Andrea asserts that similar support for transparency can be added to other theme engines with only 20 or 30 lines of code. If the theme engine is run under a window manager that supports compositing, then widgets will be rendered automatically with transparency turned on; if run under a window manager that doesn’t support compositing, the transparency will be turned off.
This work by Andrea has gone a long way at dispelling rumors that the GTK widget set isn’t flexible enough to support such features or requires “horrible hacks”. The source code for Andrea’s work hasn’t been released yet, but is being prepped at this time for public consumption.
Bring on the collaboration and brain-storming!
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December 13th, 2007 at 7:18 pm
cool finally.
KDE 4 is just around the corner so it was about time they started implementing some visuals to gnome also
January 20th, 2008 at 4:21 am
Go on, gnome developers! Show ‘em what you can do!
…things are getting very exciting these days.
January 20th, 2008 at 8:32 am
ethana,
Absolutely. And with KDE 4.0 finally out the door, I think the KDE team has a surprisngly fertile and powerful platform to work on now.
I agree with the KDE dev team that they *had* to get something out, it was just getting to be too long winded, and even though it may have not been ready for end-user consumption, the excitment it has created around the platform again and ability for devs to work on new stuff against the new APIs and frameworks, I think we are really going to see KDE shine here for the next year or so.
I wonder if this will spur the GNOME team into finally knocking out a GNOME 3.0 roadmap? That has sort of been a mythical TODO for years now, and no one has wanted to attack it yet because there hasn’t been a big need to have a huge rewrite/reorganization of anything.
I guess we’ll see.