[platform-swt-dev] Transparent Background Work

[Ian Bull <irbull@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

I was looking at the Transparent Background Color work that was introduced in M5 [1] and it's pretty awesome. Having the ability for background controls to 'bleed through' can result in some pretty nice looking UIs and brings SWT in-line with many modern UI toolkits (most mobile UI toolkits make use of these types of controls).

[1] https://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/news/4.5/M5/

I've put together a small image viewer (see attached) to experiment with this

Unfortunately when I tried to render this on Windows, the results were not nearly as good. There appears to be two limiting factors here:

1. ScrolledComposites canot have a transparent backgrounds

2. SWT only honours extreme alpha values (0 or 255). 

Is there more work planned on this feature for Mars, or have we hit the limits of what's possible with the Win32 API? Is there anything I can do to help?

Cheers,

Ian

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R. Ian Bull | EclipseSource Victoria | +1 250 477 7484
http://eclipsesource.com | http://twitter.com/eclipsesource