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Drop Shadows

Posted on 9 August 2007 by David Chisnall

Shadows are nice. Since we got compositing managers for X11, we've had the ability to do this. The xcompmgr program does it, but in a gimmicky, eye-candy way, which doesn't really add much to usability.

Shadows are definitely something we want though, so yesterday I forked xcompmgr and put it in our repository. Today we have some (early) results. Drop shadows:

Three things to note. The first is that the dock and menu bar don't have shadows. The second is that the active window has a bigger one than the others. Finally, there are no shadows visible on the Typewriter window at the top right of the screen. The first two of these are intentional. The third is not, but only occurs in screenshots, not on the screen, and so is probably not very important.

Labels: shadow, shiny, ui