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Mike Hearn | 3 Jun 2006 18:40
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Power efficient theme engine

G'day chaps and chapettes!

The default GTK+ theme is remarkably ugly yet also remarkably fast and
easy to render. The speed improvement on my machine from using it over
a prettier Cairo based theme like Clearlooks or Ubuntulooks is
noticable and I'm using a 1.2ghz chip!

It seems likely that nearly all modern, maintained GTK+ themes will
drain lots of battery power by calculating gradients, tesselating
curves, antialiasing lines and doing other things that look lovely but
munch cycles for breakfast. Therefore it would make sense to have a
new theme designed that is:

a] Not a Windows 95 throwback :)
b] Efficient to render, especially taking into account the primitives
accelerated by the laptops GPU
c] Small code-size wise

Do people agree such a thing would be worthwhile? If so we may have a
project that would be easy to work on for new developers ...

thanks -mike
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Ivan Krstic | 4 Jun 2006 00:09
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Re: Power efficient theme engine

Mike Hearn wrote:
> Do people agree such a thing would be worthwhile? 

So worthwhile, in fact, that we have a Summer of Code hacker working on
it. Here's the summary part of his proposal:

---
While GTK+ is a very convenient set of libraries to design great
graphic applications, it needs a lot of work to fit into the OLPC
project. The enhancements can be related to global hardware
performance and power saving (like the blinking cursor example in the
project proposal), or just to the fact that the screen resolution is
640x480.

I have been working with GTK+ for some time now, I know the various
toolkits and libraries quite well, and diving into the GTK+ code
itself to make it ore hardware-efficient looks at the same time very
challenging and exciting.

The project also implies some work on a particular GTK engine and
theme to let everything fit well on the screen, and be very usable,
both in color and B&W mode.
---

--

-- 
Ivan Krstic <krstic <at> fas.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D
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Mike Hearn | 4 Jun 2006 00:28
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Re: Power efficient theme engine

On 6/3/06, Ivan Krstic <krstic <at> fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> So worthwhile, in fact, that we have a Summer of Code hacker working on
> it.

Oh, awesome :) Should have checked what the SoC projects were first I guess ...
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Ronald G Minnich | 3 Jun 2006 22:56

Re: Power efficient theme engine

Mike Hearn wrote:

> 
> a] Not a Windows 95 throwback :)
> b] Efficient to render, especially taking into account the primitives
> accelerated by the laptops GPU
> c] Small code-size wise

I'm a big fan of the plan 9 window manager (rio, I use it on linux) but 
it might be too primitive for you folks.

here it is:
[rminnich <at> q plan9]$ cd src/cmd/rio
[rminnich <at> q rio]$ ls
client.c  CVS      event.c  Imakefile  manage.c  mkriorules.sh  printevent.h
color.c   dat.h    fns.h    key.c      menu.c    patchlevel.h   README
cursor.c  error.c  grab.c   main.c     mkfile    printevent.c   xevents.c
[rminnich <at> q rio]$ wc *.c
    285    683   5458 client.c
     45    138    794 color.c
    381   1969  12788 cursor.c
    101    258   2109 error.c
    597   1399  11840 event.c
    675   2052  13305 grab.c
     65    154   1358 key.c
    539   1485  12713 main.c
    537   1433  11068 manage.c
    424    944   7472 menu.c
    986   2230  24160 printevent.c
     45    123   1176 xevents.c
(Continue reading)

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