Nice to meet you Oxygen

Posted on April 27, 2007 by ereslibre

I have had some hack at Oxygen style. This all was for allowing Oxygen draw custom categories at KListView. My proposal is this one:

Of course, here you can find the patches for kdelibs, and for oxygen style.

I removed some hard coded values that had the previous version and that were just for testing reasons. I still need to handle properly the sizeFromContents method.

If you have any comments or suggestions feel free to contact me.

About ereslibre

Free Software developer and enthusiast. Architect/Developer. Researcher at Complutense University. Web developer. C, C++, PHP, Ruby, Javascript, JQuery, Qt, KDE expert. Rails hacker on the works.
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  • Sébastien Laoût

    There are a few nice ideas for the Oxygen theme:
    - Nice round background gradient
    - Nice pressed look for toolbar icons. I hope it is animated like in Polyester!
    - Nice toolbar handle (though I would “Lock Toolbar” by default: very few people move toolbars, make it safe and clean without the handles)
    - Nice 3D scrollbar scrollable-rectangle

    But globally, I’m sorry but I don’t find the theme beautiful.
    I know, it’s in a very early pre-alpha state but still:
    - Too gray, too depressing/old-fashion
    - The scrollbar is detached from the scroll-area. I understand it’s for Fitt’s law, but it’s plain uggly, the scrollbar is detached too further from the scroll-area. Even GNOME outside scrollbar is not nice: scrollbars should be inside scroll-area, they are more obviously-related this way. A more interesting change would be to remove the right-border of the main scroll-area of a window, instead of putting the scrollbar outside.
    - The scroll round-buttons are also unrelated to the scrollbar. The srollbar does not appear as “one unified widget” but it looks like a group 3 loosly-related widgets. Oh, actually, the scrollbar looks like 4 loosly-related widgets, if we include the apparently out-of-place blue small-rectangle. Too much visual elements.
    - The window decoration is too plain. Back in 90′s? A better idea would be to blend the window background with the window-frame, like in Tiger/iTunes7. Same for the buttons: no icon inside them?! Too plain. Perhapse include colors to make them more obvious, but also more living (like in Mac OS X).
    - The slider-grips are way too big! The separation between the two white areas is too big. Why not making the grip a square at the top-right of the panel-heading instead? That way we keep Fitt’s law without having big gray areas.

    I’m sorry, perhapse you will not like my comment but I hope to be constructive with it, trying to help early enough in the development stage before it’s too late, too complicated to make radical changes.
    It’s only my personal opinion. Feel free to ignore it.

  • http://www.ereslibre.es Rafael Fernández López

    Hi Sébastien,

    Let’s move to the end: I won’t ignore any comments from anybody (if they are constructive, as yours), and I think there’s no developer that will ignore constructive critics.

    I’m not an Oxygen author, and be sure I will forward your suggestions to them, I just modified it to draw categories.

    Window decorations are not from Oxygen. They are from KDE3.

    I am going to forward your comments to Oxygen style developers.

    Thanks.

  • Mogger

    Sébastien Laoût: I think the focus in the screenshot is KListView, how to draw the categories, and not the Oxygen style used.

    As far as the overall style is concerned, I agree that it’s not that good. However, I’m confident that they are still experimenting and that the “final” style will be very different from the one shown in the screenshot.
    For ecample, I thought the default windeco would look something like this: http://static.kdenews.org/dannya/vol7_356_kpdf.png
    This one looks very nice I think.

    So what do I think about the categories style (I suppose it’s the lines beneath the letters?)
    I like the idea. However, the lines are a little bit too thick for my taste, and looks “blurry” – I think I would prefer a simple solid gray/black line.

  • Matthias Pospiech

    I think, that the blurred dividers look good in first place, but make it difficult for the eye to divide the sections – what these lines are made for.

    This theme is using shadows which looks good, but is not a good idea nowadays because flat surfaces are ‘in’ and look cleaner.

    In total, the theme should make sure that the eye can recognise different areas without thinking – which means visible borders. The blured and grayed dividers in this theme look good but are less good to use.

    My best experience with overdesigned interfaces was Vista – in my company we had a new computer which everyone wanted to play with (looks like a game), but only half would have wanted to work with.

    Matthias

  • http://pinheiro-kde.blogspot.com/ pinheiro

    the look is still very early loads loads of things to improve i hope people dont start posting screnies around.
    its still very far from a final thinsg and many thgings there are just a placeolder.

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  • Vide

    Mmmmh, I like the poliahness of this style! Finally no more frame borders!! This is a *big* improvement.
    But please, please, please do something for selected item in the left listview! that uncentered rectangle is absolutely horrible! it’s so ’80s and it just doesn’t fit with Oxygen, KDE4 and moderns UI at all!

  • http://www.dragardeal.com remy

    Well, I’ve perhaps very strange tastes, but I LOVE how it looks. If it’s not default for 4.0, make it possible to use it.

    “For ecample, I thought the default windeco would look something like this: http://static.kdenews.org/dannya/vol7_356_kpdf.png
    This one looks very nice I think.”

    Tastes are really personal because I find it ugly and confusing.

    Rafael keep up the good work !

  • Vide

    Remy, the windeco you’re linking is, AFAIK, the Kubuntu Feisty’s one. And anyway Rafael already said that the windeco in the screenshot is from KDE3 and it’s not the Oxygen one.

    By the way, Rafa, I’m waiting for a little bit more “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” from the oxygen team…

  • http://neonisi.wordpress.com/ cover

    hi rafael, i’ve used your screen for a modify about icons: http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=57260
    What do you think?

  • http://www.ereslibre.es Rafael Fernández López

    Hi cover,

    I have to say that I like your idea. If implemented, we should take in count special cases, like for example if it contains files, but they are all hidden, or something like that.

    The idea is pretty nice itself, forgetting implementation details.

  • cover

    I think that with a folder with only hidden files would appear as one without files.
    Probably the problem is that a user can think that that folder is empty and so delete it. But also actually if you enter in a folder and you don’t have the “show hidden files” active you’ll see any files. And also in this case you’ll think that the folder is empty and so delete it.
    Or maybe it would be nice if, with “show hidden files” it show the folder as one with files, and with it disable as a empty folder.

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  • Daniel

    I hope that Konqueror on KDE 4
    is still alive.

  • Mercurio

    Hi Rafael.
    Maybe I’m late… but I hope you will read this.
    I have just now realized that what I miss about this kind of categorization is a slightly different (and obviously cool) background for each letter. Again: http://mac.wikia.com/wiki/Image:SystemPreferencesTiger.png
    Without it, I feel myself “lost” among the icons.
    This solution is older than PC, and you use it even in your blog for the comments ;-)