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JuK facelift

Sunday, 15 May 2011  |  scott wheeler

So, somewhat miraculously, I've been doing a little KDE hacking again this week for the first time since, oh, 2006 or so (aside from TagLib, which recently moved to GitHub).

Being as I'm all a startupy web weenie these days, some of the design sins of my youth have been haunting me. I wanted to give JuK a little bit of a fixer-upper. Almost all of the 20 commits that cia.vc says that I've done this week stem from either polishing the interface some or improving the initial experience on startup.

The major bits are:

  • Made the selected playlist thing nice and antialiased and gradiented and shiney. That had been bugging me for ages.
  • Ganked the slider and volume control code from Amarok and and popped them into JuK.
  • Cleaned up the tag editor (still not shown by default, but in the screenies below for the before-and-after).

We'll probably be sacrificing a few of the more broken features on the alter of polishedness in the next bit trying to get a nice spiffied up version into KDE 4.7.

Here's the before and after:

I'd love to someday have time to go all OCD and just spend like a couple weeks fixing things like text alignment and margins all over KDE. I tend to look at apps like I would web pages at this point, and such things pop right out at me at this point. Alas, I reckon I'll probably be back to the grind of work here pretty soon, but it's been a fun nostalgic interlude.