Richard Stellingwerff

Well I decided it was time for a proper website. Since it would be mostly a weblog, I decided to try this thing called Wordpress.

As with anything in Gentoo, installation was a breeze. I had it up and running in a matter of minutes, and I haven’t got any wiser doing it. Automatic installations rule

I will mostly blog about things related to Clearlooks (my pet project) and Linux (one of my horrible addictions).

I hope you’ll enjoy your stay!

With the next release of GTK+ the latest advances in graphics technology, called cairo, will be available to themers and programmers. Cairo gives high quality output, ideal for creating smooth themes for GTK+ applications. For more information on cairo, check the website.

Porting Clearlooks to cairo
That’s right, I’m working on a new version of Clearlooks, using this new API. It isn’t a 1:1 port, but look at it as the Clearlooks I’ve always meant it to be. It’ll be shinier, prettier, and… oh right, slower.

Speed Issues
Right now cairo isn’t exactly “fast”. I can’t give you any numbers, but believe me… You’ll see and feel the difference. This makes sense though, considering the complexity of the drawing operations. You’ll see anti-aliasing everywhere, making the theme look very smooth. With time, cairo will be optimised, and the speed issues should dissapear.

The Result (so far)
I’ve started working on this a few days ago. So far I’ve finished the progressbar, slider, button, and entry widgets. Here’s a little screenshot.

Clearlooks-cairo won’t be ready anytime soon, but the code is in CVS, so feel free to try it out. It requires GTK+ 2.7 or newer.

I’ve been working on writing a new theme preview application. It’s basically a huge window with most common widgets on it.

Since everybody loves screenshots:

And for those that like code too: The Widget Factory 0.1

I’ve had quite some requests to port Clearlooks to Qt/KDE, and the idea has been playing in my head for a while now.

Since porting the original Clearlooks to KDE is a very time consuming process, I decided to design the cairo version in such a way that makes it as independent from GTK+ as possible. The result is that, when Qt support cairo (if ever), porting Clearlooks to Qt/KDE will be pretty straightforward.

In the process of disconnecting the drawing code from GTK+, I learned that I have been displaying disabled toggled toggle buttons wrong all the time. So even if the button is toggled, I’d still display it as if it wasn’t. Clearlooks-cairo displays it properly though.
Behold:

I’m also surprised at the cleanness of the drawing code. I can imagine that anyone that has worked with cairo a bit will be able to pick it up immediately. But even if you have no experience with the cairo API, it will still be pretty easy to understand. And that’s worth something, in my opinion

Were you heavily dissapointed by the lack of on-the-fly theme switching? Couldn’t stand the fact that the progressbars didn’t animate when dragging those sliders? Or simply despised the lack of tab widgets on all four sides?

Well I’ve got news for you! The Widget Factory 0.2 does all that!

So, without further adieu, I present: the download link!

Oh, and a little screenshot too:

During the absence of new posts, a lot of work has gone into Clearlooks-cairo. To give people an idea of the progress being made, I’ve set three milestones.

• 1. Finish the basic version, without custimization options.
• 2. Add the customization options.
• 3. Polishing it, and then polishing it some more.

Right now, I’ve almost reached the first milestone. What’s missing is the focus rings. It will be easy to add that, though.

If you would like to try the new Clearlooks, you’ll have to get it from GNOME CVS, module “gtk-engines”. Please keep in mind that it’s still a bit on the slow side, especially with cairo-1.0.0. The CVS version of cairo has seen a few great speed improvements, though.

Here’s the latest WIP screenshot (click for full):

Don’t worry about the scrollbars, the old style is still there if you don’t like the new one.

Clearlooks-cairo has animated progressbars again, thanks to some evil hacks from Kulyk Nazar. In addition to animated progressbars, we also have fading checkboxes and radiobuttons. Pretty neat stuff!

But that’s not what I came here for. I’d like everyone’s opinion on the direction the progressbar should animate. Below are three progressbars. Two of them animate in a different direction, one of them doesn’t animate at all. Please let me know which one you like most by clicking on one of them.

Vote left to right

Vote right to left!

Vote no animation!

Unfortunately, you can only vote once per IP address. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Oh, and feel free to tell me why you prefer one over the other, by adding a comment below.

Thanks!

I’m overwhelmed by the response I got on yesterday’s poll. I should do this more often

Here are the results at the time of writing this:

The result to me was quite unexpected! The old Clearlooks had RTL (opposite direction) animation, yet only 1 or 2 people every complained about that! But then again, animation was always disabled by default, so not many people ever noticed that.

I guess it’s clear what the mainstream preference is now. You can still vote, but I doubt it’s gonna make a difference. I’ll probably make it a an option in gtkrc eventually, so that themers can decide in which direction it should animate.

Thank you all for voting and commenting!

My fellow Clearlooks developer Daniel Borgmann has been working on an early christmas present for all of you Behold the all new shiny Clearlooks 2.0 Metacity theme!

It goes really well with the upcoming cairo version of Clearlooks.

Get the cool stuff here:

	clearlooks-metacity-2.0.tar.gz
	clearlooks-xfwm4-2.0.tar.gz

To install it, unpack it to /usr/share/themes and overwrite the old metacity theme (the metacity-1 directory). I got problems when I placed it in ~/.themes but your mileage may vary

Update: Added the Xfwm4 theme.

So yeah, today is my 24th birthday

I’m not celebrating it in any fancy way, except for eating some cake with my parents & brothers and perhaps some relatives if they choose to show up