How to draw nice and fast window shadows?

Hey, there!

...coming from here: http://forum.world.st/Hi-DPI-Check-tp4817402.html

Is there some algorithmic guru out there, who knows or could imagine how to draw nice-looking window shadows in Squeak?

My two cents: Shadow drawing is expensive... caching is inevitable... window resizing would slow down anyway...

Why am I asking this? We should/could get rid of all system windows having this small shadow but think about how to highlight the currently active window better with a nice shadow like this:

http://www.creativetechs.com/iq/clean_up_shadows_in_leopard_screenshots.html
http://www.howtogeek.com/121834/how-to-re-enable-the-mouse-pointer-drop-shadow-in-windows-8/ 

..hmmm... would this be a "killer application" for thinking about HW graphics acceleration in Squeak? :-D

Best,
Marcel

I did a quick spike to give a better idea of what I am talking about.

1) Here is the code:
better-shadow.cs

2) Here are some pictures:
new-shadows-1.png
new-shadows-2.png

I decided to always have rounded shadows -- even for rectangular windows/menus.

Do we want to have this with a preference in trunk?

Best,
Marcel

P.S.: Yes, resizing large (> 1000 pixels) windows gets slow on my Core i7. :-D

Just to get an overall impression of your opinion: http://vote.pollcode.com/21247558

Best,
Marcel

I’m really not a fan of fake shadows around windows and *really* not  for menus. I don’t much like menus having icons either; they don’t add anything except space and time-to-open.

It seems to me to be a relic of an attempt to make computer screens look like paper-based desks in order to convince people that these new-fangled computy-thingies are useful. Well, we all know that now. This degree of fake-realism skeuomorphism simply isn’t needed here.

What *is* important is minimal clutter, maximum speed (anything that slows down a modern desktop machine is decidedly overdoing it!) and appropriate affordances to make discovering (and recalling) function reasonably easy.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Oxymorons: Same difference

Considering menu icons, you must not overdo it and provide an icon for each and every item. Having this, icons can speed up item localization in larger (>5) lists. However, icons should still be somewhat useful and appropriate --- and not using an icon for the sake of itself.

For the shadow: Discovering the currently active window (and keyboard focus) at a glance should be a must-have in such a working environment.

Still, there are so many different working styles out there. And people got used to so many stuff... ;-)

Best,
Marcel