Taskbar, thumbnails and halos

Various KDE 1.-4. Improvements

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Description:

What if one hovers over an app in the taskbar, all the open windows is made transparent, and the hovered app gets a flashing (or non-flashing, your choice) halo? (Halo or shadow, but shadow is a more colour-independent description)

How it could be implemented is by on making the windows transparent, all the open windows could be converted to OpenGL-textures (and then be made transparent), and so not hogging the CPU-resources.

If there is a positive outcome, I'll post it to the kde developers. I'm not even going to dare doing it myself (no C++ programmer, just a fresh Delphi/Windows convert), but this feature is one I really like to see make it's way to KDE4. This is very kompose-ish, but would greatly improve the ui.

Please leave your thoughts.

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elektroschock

16 years ago

Have you tried http://lazarus.freepascal.org

??

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C

daphantom

16 years ago

Lazarus: GTK.
I do not GTK until GTK-on-KDE is finished. (Unless I'm somewhere mistaken...)

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xfury

16 years ago

no its not hard. All you need to do is implement it in your own XCM (X Compositing Manager). No need to use OpenGL either because XRender can be accelerated (and is accelerated fairly well on NVIDIA hardware with the binary drivers).

The only real problem would be interacting with the taskbar. However it could be possible to integrate translucency control into the taskbar (through the translucency window-manager property which transset sets) so that it dims all the others except the one you want.

Right now all my windows have shadows, so perhaps if it was a general halo of a different color.

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Superstoned

16 years ago

but a good idea anyway. expecially if you use kxdocker/kooldock/etc. with such an osx-like bar, its very usefull I think to be able to find your app very fast. but also with the current kicker, if an mouse-over the taskbar whould make all apps except the moused-over app transparant, thats very nice. Yes, imho a very good idea. keep 'em coming ;-)

you might fill a wish for kwin and/or kicker...

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vanyar

16 years ago

Making that would need a complete OpenGL GUI and this is not a simple task (look at Microsoft with Longhorn or Sun with LookingGlass). Maybe they could make it through the Xorg 6.8 server using composite extensions. It's something that's already there. I don't know about performance, something like that it's made on windows through Stardock's WindowFX and still it's slow, even with good drivers. Think about the poor driver support we have in Linux. Nvidia drivers are better, but not at the quality level of windows drivers. And let's not talk about ATI drivers. They are worse.

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updated Sep 23 2004
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