Does the new AppServer support drop shadows? Or does that need 3D hardware acceleration?
I found a place in the xcode documentation where the navigation reminds of Haikus navigation. And the added drop shadow really helps to visualize the z-order of the windows.
Btw have you guys seen these mock ups?
Are there any attempts to modernize the looks of haiku?
New AppServer? Do we have a new one? I haven’t noticed it.
Drop shadow doesn’t need 3D acceleration.
Efficient drop shadow requires hovewer compositing support in AppServer. This is missing, afaik.
Compared to the one I used in 2000 its new. 
Nope, the one used in 2000 was the BeOS AppServer.
The one in Haiku have nothing to do with the BeOS AppServer except the provided functionality and name.
So it is not new, it is the Haiku one.
I did see those mockups, but if I recall correctly, their author was adamant that we would not accept it ever or something like that. Which is not really true: we already have alternate decorators (BeDecorator, WinDecorator), you can already ship more in packages as you like, and you will soon be able to add theming engines to these. So I’m not sure what his opposition was…
Also, yes, app_server can’t really support drop shadows on window borders without good compositing. I mean you could implement it, but it would likely be very slow.
If I would implement it, it wouldn’t be slow. I don’t write slow code 
Does the appearance app support theming of menus? Would be very nice to be able to remove borders (or set border color to fake it) and also add support for leading, trailing, top/bottom spacing for (BMenu). I haven’t been coding in BeOS/Haiku for 15 years, so I don’t remember the classes correctly.
//Mikael
It does not at present but will soonish, I need to move the BControlLook instantation around a bit.
Sounds great. Back in the days I wrote some decorators for YellowTab’s, Zeta.
Do you need the full source code for Haiku to write decorators? Or can you develop them like normal apps?
I’m not sure. You should be able to develop them like normal apps, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re missing some files in the devel package for this. If you can’t do it, file a bug.
Yes, they are just standard add-ons but you may need to extract a .h file from Haiku sources, and probably start from a copy of the existing decorator as a skeleton.
As for drop shadow, personally I find the ones in OSX way too large and ugly. I’m sure we can do something more subtle and elegant that fits with Haiku style, and it could even be faster to draw.
Those Haiku mockups look great!
Indeed, those mockups are excellent and would really help to bring Haiku’s appearance up to date without losing the BeOS feel.
I wonder if those mockups are possible now that window decor and control looks are public.
They were always possible, even when decors and control looks were private. Nobody took the time to do them then.
We cannot do rounded decors, right?
You may be able to with some clever invalidation tricks, I don’t know. Transparent windows are also “possible” under the present design, they will just be rather slow.
The only thing that I miss is dropshadows cause they can really help to show you the correct z-order of tracker navigation menus.
Sounds like this can be fixed if it isn’t possible? I don’t see what the problem would be, IIRC the window area is currently a BRegion but clipping in app_server was improved and a BShape or a BPicture could be used instead now. We may even be able to use the existing BView transparency layer API to do transparent windows, by just making the root layer of a window be transparent?
The current situation is that you can do compositing inside a BView, but not between windows, which is a bit silly, isn’t it?
Thanks,
It’s a bit of a shame. Those screenshots look nice, at least to me. It looks like a more “refined” version of what we have, without making too many UI changes. Hope someone takes up the challenge.
This all rolls back to the “we need 3d acceleration and a compositor in Haiku” argument which has been circulating for a couple of years now. Until we (end users/non-core developers) find the resources and/or the funding (excluding the Inc, which doesn’t want to fund this) then we’re stuck in software 3d world.
