Shadows in Window Screenshots

Every few months there is a review about Plasma by dedoimedo and one critic point is that screenshots include the shadow. As I’m rather annoyed of these complaints about this I’m now doing a blog post to explain the situation so that in future this can be skipped.

Shadows in the screenshots are not a bug, but an intended feature. It was implemented by me in 2010 on request by Nuno Pinheiro, our Oxygen god. Before screenshots did not support shadows and looked really, really bad as the window decorations are round and contained black corners. Shadows were part of the design and that was completely lacking. So we came up with a rather decent solution on how to screenshot the window with shadows included. I first mentioned this new effect in this blog post from August 2010.

This has been eight years ago. I cannot remember any bug report about this being an issue. But dedoimedo reports about this every few months in a rather aggressive way:

I can see your heartbeat, coming from the shadows. Seriously, toggle on, toggle off. Plasma Kid.

Given that literally nobody else cares about this: no, spectacle won’t get a checkbox to toggle shadows. We are not going to reduce the usability of all users by adding another checkbox due to one reviewer having problems with it. In future you can know blame me personally for this instead of doing bad reviews on Plasma. It’s all Martin’s fault. Thank you.