SEP
20
2008

Top Level Transparent windows on Mac

Submitted by Siraj Razick

video Link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLMrAx4AYqk

We all know making the top level window transparent is easy on X11 with XCompsite stuff. and I thought I could get away with some simple flag or a function call on mac to do the same. but when actually needed to do it.. I found that this is was impossible :(, unless Qt widget creation was modified. (http://trolltech.com/developer/knowledgebase/faq.2007-02-08.3940505976/). so if you have the same problem as me.. here is a patch that enables Transparency on the top level windows. this is very unfortunate I hope some day this problem will be solved, and if you know a better way to do it, without patching QT it would be helpful too :). the patch is kinda ugly so if you need it just drop me a comment or an email ;-)

Comments

One thing I noticed several months ago (as in pre-4.0) when I worked on getting plasma to run on Mac OSX (which btw currently seems to be broken again, which is not surpising as nobody worked on it for months I think), is that somehow it is already possible to have transparent/translucent windows. My panel was partly translucent from the start without any additional code, as you can see in the screenshot. Later I added code to get rid of the window decorations and stuff, but that panel has always been perfectly partly transparant. So it must be somehow possible without making changes to Qt (not that however I was not able to make plasma's dashboard translucent, but I didn't spent a lot of time on it).

By mkruisselbrink at Sat, 09/20/2008 - 11:53