Since I’ve always given too much importance to the superficial appearance, I was very uncomfortable with the default KDE password lineEdit look (that hides the typed characters with asterisks) in contrast to the one of Windows XP or Gnome, where the passord characters are hidden by a bold dot, being vertically centered it’s much more appealing.
Yesterday on Damino’s blog I discovered that this could be achieved straightforward with few lines of code in the style, it seems that it was first used in the QWindowsXpStyle bundled with QT. So I can only give a big thank you to him 🙂
Now I feel like the urge to rip it off into polyester :-), so there is a sneak peak of the upcoming version:

New release of Polyester KDE theme available for download!
The default look is changed a little bit, I think for the last time. Many bugs have been squashed and the configuration dialogs are way more prettier and hopefully more usable.
As the name rc1 suggests, it should be considered almost final, the only differences from a future 1.0 will be only bugfixes.

The obligatory changelog:
widget:
-less (and bigger) dots on QSplitters
-button like menuitems works with transparent menus
-menu stripe works with transparent menus
-entirely redesigned the configuration dialog (should be more usable)
-a lot of code cleanups in the configuration code
-light gradient in the progressbar blank area
-corrected an ugly rendering bug in the QGridView headers
-corrected a rendering bug in the slider with reverse layout
-minor cosmetic changes to the following widgets:
-scrollbars
-sliders
-default buttons contour
-spinboxes
-inactive tabs
-better mouse over highlight with checkboxes and radiobuttons
-border of buttons and other 3d widgets

deco:
-option to make rectangular titlebar buttons (at the moment is the default)
-antialiased titlebar buttons border
-redesigned the configuration dialog to be similar to the style configuration
-added svg sources of the titlebar buttons icons so it’s easier to make modifications
-some code cleanups
-drawing of titlebar buttons follows the global contrast settings

Released today a second beta for Polyester 1.0 that fixes some important issues.
Changelog:
widget:
-Nicer animation on buttons when the mouse cursor leaves them
-Shadowed text of buttons and menubar configurable separately
-Fixed a bug in the rendering of scrollbar handles
-Don’t render dots on scrollbar handle when the handle is too little
-Optimization: lot useless loops in the animation code (i.e. deactivating the QTimer when is not needed :))

deco:
-More Fitts’ law friendly: titlebar buttons works also when the mouse cursor is at the top edge of the screen
-No longer draws the round border if the window is maximized
-Uses 16×16 icons in titlebar where available instead of scaling down bigger icons

Polyester 1.0_beta2 is asking you: “pleeaase, download meee!“

After neglecting it for a little bit to work on Tasty Menu (my poor brain still has some difficulties to do multitasking :D), today I’ve released Polyester 1.0Beta1, with some bugfixes as well as some cosmetic changes celebrating the approaching of 1.0, that will be the last Qt3/Kde3 version. After that I will begin the painful journey to port it to qt4/kde4, that I hope will offer enough nice capabilities to implement some ideas that was still not feasible with qt3.
You can download it here.
Changelog for Polyester 1.0Beta1:
widget:
-Corrected a bug in the rendering of checked menubar items
-Added a cute animation to the default botton text that makes it always readable
-Rounded focus rectangle where it’s possible
-Corrected a bug that made displaying the menubar in Opera browser with incorrect colors
-Configuration option to disable the coloring of the sorted header in listviews
-Less dots in scrollbar slider
-More contrast in button borders
-Some changes under the hood that make some elements like headers, scrollbars and tabbars to look a little bit more clean
-Corrected a little bug in the animation of toolbar buttons

deco:
-Titlebar button icons have a sharper shape
-More smooth buttons animations
-Button animations styles “colorize” and “fade out” should work better regardless what the buttons color is.

Released today a new bugfix version of polyester that fixes the annoying issue of 0.9.2 about tabbar label colouring and also have some other micro-fixes or enhancement.
Go get it 🙂

Polyester is alive, kicking and 0.9.2, go get it 🙂

Today I’ve released a new version of the Polyester kde theme. This time it has both many bugfixes and some new nice enhancements, in particular I’m very proud of the new kick-ass listview.
Hoping I didn’t introduced too many new bugs, this will be the last release from here to some time in the future, next version after the exams session 🙂
As usual you can find the tarball on this site and also on Kde-Look along some precompiled binaries.