Richard Stellingwerff

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

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.

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!