Some people have expressed concern about the panel drop shadows. At least three people didn’t like that they drew the shadows over the windows close to them. So in response I’ve just committed a change that makes the panel drop shadows only draw on the desktop. I think it looks quite neat and tidy actually. One person said “Oh cute”
Here’s a now obligatory screenshot
Oh, and I removed drop shadows from around dragging icons, so when you drag files there won’t be an ugly shadow now.
And I fixed a few potential crashes and documented the source with a huge explanation of how compositing works.
Very nice. And it’s right too: in the real world shadows don’t drop over objects on the same Z level. I love Metacity, I really do.
Neat! This looks better and better.
Request: Antialias the rounded corners.
*Two* persons said “Oh cute”. The other one was me :)
*Two* +1 == *Three* :-)
Amazing stuff. I would also suggest to make the shadow of the unfocused windows much much more subtle (I’d actually drop it completely, but I’m an extremist). That way it aids showing which window is focused.
Jakub: Actually, someone else pointed out to me today that that was how OSX did it, by using a smaller shadow. I’ll look into doing that too.
Hi Iain,
great work on this side of Metacity, thanks. I’m running svn revision 3445 but I still have drop shadows on dragging icons and tooltips (did you remove tooltips shadow too?) and the dropping shadow of panel is drawn over windows. Any idea?
luca: yeah, I had to revert the panel drop shadows over windows thing, it had a weird bug in it that I’ve not found yet. I’ve not touched tooltips shadows, and although it was working for me, I seem to have a drop shadow only on the first icon I drag, all other drags have no shadows. I’ll look into that too.
WOW! great work!
I just checked out your branch from gnome svn and after one fast compile i got it working. It does quite better in performance vs compiz. My problems with compiz were related with scrolling, it was unusable, as the application stopped scrolling quite after i released my mouse wheel. With metacity there’s a lag there also, but it’s far more responsive. It seems to consume double the cpu in comparation with plain metacity.
This is great i can run awn now with out the need of the bloated compiz-fusion! :P
Also, if you are open to opinions, i dont like the black border on the windows when you do the ALT-tab.
(note i tested this on my Thinkpad t60 with an ati X1300)
Great! This drop shadow for panel is definitively better :-)
I can confirm the drop shadow only on the first dragged icon.
Iain, another note about the shadows: it seems that kwin for KDE4 is using a texture to draw the shadow. In a recent change, they commited an updated texture using a gaussian blur instead of a linear gradient. This should make the shadow more realistic.
From KDE svn log
Perfectness is on the details.
Yep, thats cute. Thanks!
Also…
“Request: Antialias the rounded corners.” +1
At least some drawing method, primitive, or option to the Metacity XML theme file. Something like would be great!