KDE Three Beta in Trysil, Norway - Page 2

New and old clothes for KDE

If you have had the opportunity of using a recent KDE2 beta, you may know that KDE2 has supported widget themes for quite a while now. You may have noticed that these themes are fast. Really fast. And even those themes using pixmaps and gradients run at a decent speed, thanks mostly to Qt's excellent theming-engine and our optimized pixmap storage and cache mechanism.

In addition to native KDE2 themes, we are pleased to announce that KDE now supports pixmap GTK themes. For importing a GTK theme into KDE, you just need to use the 'klegacyimport' wizard, available as a little standalone GUI application. However, while GTK themes are displayed faster and more efficiently than even native GTK itself, we do not recommend using this format for creating new themes. Theme developers should prefer KDE2's native widget theming which yields superior results both in terms of quality and speed. A nice HowTo and some documentation on KDE2 theming is available here.

One of the central commands of KDE is unification of the desktop experience. In respect for this, the excellent mechanism of KDE look propagation to non-KDE apps was recently extended so that GTK+ based applications be also taken into account. As a consequence, when the user chooses to export KDE look to external applications, not only compliant xrdb applications (like those using the Motif toolkit) or pure Qt applications will obey, but all applications that use GTK+ will display KDE's color schemes and fonts.

For the curious, here are some screenshots of KDE2 using GTK themes:

I Con Do It -- Icons in KDE 2

In KDE2, icons are themable as well. A nice application of this feature can be seen if you start KDE2 on an 8-bit color display. In this case, KDE will automatically default to a carefully crafted icon theme based on a 40-color palette: 216 extra colors are left for the more color-greedy applications. Of course, on a true color display, you would get the hi-color icon theme.

The size of the icons can also be easily changed. Just right-click on the toolbar handle, and you'll find a menu with a selection of various icon sizes. Or change the icon size in other locations or globally from the KDE Control Center. This way you can make optimal use of your desktop space and monitor:

Also notable are the various icon effects. These include levels of greyscaling, highlighting, colorization, saturation/hue, semitransparency... and the ability to customize the behavior and appearance of the icons in all the various states (MouseOver, default, disabled) and locations (desktop, toolbars, menus, panel).

In fact, if you are creative enough, you can do such things as make Konqueror look like Netscape. Or Internet Explorer. Or make it look like something entirely different. We tried our hand at it:

While these are aesthetic features, they can also be quite important from a usability point of view. For example, if you are an artist or graphic designer, you may not want your icons to look too colorful. In fact, if at all possible, you'd want to work in a color-neutral environment. Well, with KDE2, you can switch all your icons to grey quite easily - and if you want a colorful desktop to impress your friends, it is just a click away!