Month: December 2005

gicmo: Unless I’m very much mistaken, I think you are talking about the Xcomposite extension, which has very little to do with cairo.

However, the nice rounded corners in your screenshot look like they might well have been generated by cairo.

There seems to be a lot of confusion amongst the populace about what cairo actually is. Let me start by explaining what cairo is not.

<b>CAIRO IS NOT:</b>

• A new GTK+ theme engine

• A vector image file format

• Animation in themes

• Magical eye candy

• Unique individual widgets
  </ul>

  <b>CAIRO IS:</b>

  • A new, feature rich, set of resolution independent drawing functions, capable of working on top of a number of different technologies.
    </ul>

    That is all. The reason this is exciting for themes is that it supports anti-aliasing, and has programming functions similar to those you would find in any other vector graphics drawing package. This includes multi-stop gradients and paths. It is also exciting because it can make use of different technologies if they exist – such as Open GL and render acceleration. In fact, without any render acceleration it is currently considerably slower than the existing drawing functions.

    HOWEVER – Nothing will use cairo unless it is programmed specifically to do so. cairo is an alternative drawing API (Application Programming Interface), but it has not replaced (yet) the existing drawing api in GTK+, which is still GDK.

    Find out more about the cairo project here: http://www.cairographics.org

gtk-engines 2.7.1 released last night – a true 11th hour effort by myself and Richard. This release includes several important fixes for Clearlooks for anyone using 2.7.0.

Tarballs in the usual place:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gtk-engines/2.7

I am still looking for developers to adopt-an-engine. No cairo work has started on the following theme engines:

• hc (high contrast)
• Industrial
• lighthouseblue
• metal
• smooth
• thinice

This means these themes will have no cairo goodness for GNOME 2.14 unless someone else helps out – there just isn’t enough time for me to convert them all myself! If you’re a developer with an interest in themeing then please do contact me.

Introducing ….. GNOME SCIENCE!!

Continuing my effort to make GNOME more fun for users, here is a preview of the first theme in the GNOME Plus! Pack (still looking for a better name if anyone has any ideas…)

Many thanks to radel for his efforts on the science theme, and everyone else who is helping out. If you’d like to get involved, drop me an e-mail, attach something to the wiki page, or just chat on gnome-art