effects to the gnome panel

[delphinen]

I think it would be very cool if we could add some fade in/fade out effects in the minimized window buttons in gnome panel, like, when you close a window, the next button in the gnome panel would enlarge smoothly.
Could this be possible with the current technology?

[RYX]

That would be perfectly possible, if implemented as a feature in the gnome-panel. Compiz does not handle the minimized windows within the desktop's panel. But it's a good idea ... you could ask it to the gnome-developers as a feature for the gnome-panel.

:)

[fab]

Well it would be cool !
But i think that the first feature we should try to add is real transparency support when composite is enabled !

It should be pretty straight forward to do !

[apoclypse]

Whatwould be even better would be for gnome to be fully composite aware not just the gnome panel.

[fab]

Yeah but well it is a pretty huge work todo and i think it really needs some kind of thinking and spec before writing ... we should try to tend to something pretty unified as you can see in mac os x with not so much effects but just some that adds usability mainly !

Anyway i think it will come step by step but il will :)

[apoclypse]

I would think that the changes would have to be made to the gtk toolkit as opposed to gnome itself. If gtk supported some sort composite support, I would think the could be handled by whatever compositing manager being used. Am I wrong?

[FunkyM]

GTK 2.10 version introduced composite support.

Thus you can use gdk_screen_is_composited() to see if for instance compiz is running.

Then, implementing real transparency is fairly trivial by adjusting the visual/colormap usage to RGBA instead of RGB and extend the way you draw stuff (such as using cairo) to draw using alpha.

Anything more complex such as Quartz-like animations requires a new bling-bling library to efficiently do stuff and not reimplement that in each and every GTK app. again.

Good luck!

[flargen]

GTK 2.10 version introduced composite support.

Thus you can use gdk_screen_is_composited() to see if for instance compiz is running.

Then, implementing real transparency is fairly trivial by adjusting the visual/colormap usage to RGBA instead of RGB and extend the way you draw stuff (such as using cairo) to draw using alpha.

Anything more complex such as Quartz-like animations requires a new bling-bling library to efficiently do stuff and not reimplement that in each and every GTK app. again.

Good luck!

Which area of code would one have to modify in the gnome-panel to adjust the visual/colourmap to RGBA

[FunkyM]

I guess somewhere in the background drawing (http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-panel/gnome-panel/panel-background.c?rev=1.26&view=markup) code ;)

From what I quickly glimpsed at, it uses cairo for drawing and thus it should be not hard to add real transparency.

Some of the code logic might have to be changed such as retrieving the background image is not required when you got real transparency.

If anyone happens to create a patch feel free to submit it to bugzilla.gnome.org.