Harsh J

Polishing your K Desktop never seems to stop. First its the Desktop appearances, the plethora of widgets available to choose and use from for the desktop and the taskbar, the hilighting schemes in Kate/KWrite, it keeps going on. Maybe a bad thing – you never settle.

I was trying out the kde-extragear-plasmoids AUR package yesterday on my ArchLinux’s plain KDE installation and I came across this wonderful plasmoid known as Smooth Tasks. While nothing innovative in itself, its a simple plasmoid that apes the Windows 7 taskbar. Provides icon views of the applications running and allows peeking into them when hovered upon, and if grouped – lets you switch using the previews. I’ll leave the screenshots to do the rest of explanation.

What I liked most about Windows 7 is its ability to color the hover-glow on the icons in the taskbar based on the average computed color of the icon itself. This feature, as explained by Long Zheng, “delivers some sentimental value by making it easy to identify applications by color.” I completely agree with that point. However, Smooth Tasks missed this feature, and the built in light feature didn’t move entirely with the mouse pointer as well.

I cloned the code today to add, at least an initial working version, the color hot-tracking to Smooth Tasks and it was done by the afternoon. I’ve pushed the changes to the Smooth Tasks fork over at Bitbucket (which is a great site, by the way) and the image below describes how the initial work looks like. Notice the soft color glow. Here are some more pictures, with other icons.

Color Hot-tracking in Smooth Tasks on KDE

Now all I’ve to figure out is a way to enhance the glow or another component of the effect to give it a more polished look. Windows 7 also colors the border of the taskbar item with the average color but that’s not possible with the way the KDE’s glow around items work, as far as I know. Please let me know if am wrong.

Sort of fixing actually

Update: As of GIMP 2.6, this feature is inbuilt. Select whichever portion you want to create a new image with, and then after copy/cut via Ctrl+c or Ctrl+x, just do Ctrl+Shift+v to paste into a new image based on the selection’s size in the clipboard.

As you might have seen in GIMP (2.2 and below) and Photoshop, when you copy an image to the clipboard (Ctrl + C or Ctrl + X) and create a new file via (File -> New) the size shown there automatically adjusts itself to the size of the image in the clipboard.

This feature was missing from the latest GIMP release (2.4). The reasons for that may be found here, but IMO its a bad thing this can’t be supported anymore, I heavily relied on it for one

Now on to fixing this issue:

My approach, like others, is to rely on hotkeys. In the following guide, I make a shortcut of the required function by mapping it to the [Y] key on the keyboard.

First off, the feature we’re looking for is the ‘Paste as new image‘ feature found under Edit menu of the working image.

Now to set a hotkey, use the guide below:

1. Go to File > Keyboard Shortcuts.

2. Expand the Edit menu and click and set the accelerator for “Paste as New” as [Y] or any key you wish (Must not conflict with other ones).

3. You’re done!

Now when you copy an area in an image and need to create a new file of that size you copied, just hit the [Y] key and it should do the task.

Gimp on!

P.s. In case you screw up the hotkey settings, just remember to revert to defaults, don’t panic.