Hello Planet!

The planetkde bot was very eager to see what’s there to get, and found a two day old post of mine. “Nevermind”, he thought, “just aggregate it!” … without giving me a chance to introduce myself, so I will now make up for that.

Some of you may know me as “kdepepo” on freenode, that quiet lurker on #kde-cafe and other KDE and openSUSE related channels. Being a teacher, I like to help others, so I sometimes help answering questions regarding C++ Qt programming on #qt.

Others may know me as “skulptor”, because of my work on Skulpture. Or you may have seen me as “cfeck”, as a irregular committer to KDE svn, currently trying to improve Moty’s deKorator window theming engine.

But all of my friends know me as “Christoph”, and if you want, just call me this way.

In this spirit: Hello Planet!

Theme previews in deKorator

After porting deKorator to KDE 4 I thought that it could need some improvements. There are currently two issues that I (any many other users) find irritating.

The first issue is theme selection. After you selected a theme from the list, you need to click “Apply Theme Paths” to apply the paths to the Paths tab page. This seems intuitive in the light that the engine only sees these paths, but I guess most users do not want to create a theme, but just select it from the list.

The other issue is colorization. There are many check boxes and options that affect colors of the theme and buttons, and one can only guess how they all play together.

Well, none of the above issues are addressed yet, but I started hacking on a new theme selector, which has in-list previews and offers a “Get New Themes…” download button to invoke the standard GHNS dialog.

You can find deKorator in KDE svn trunk, path is playground/artwork/dekorator.