Friday night I was playing with inkscape and I tried to do a kickoff mockup because I don’t like kickoff’s current look (kickoff is a white and flat rectangle that doesn’t fit really well in a black plasma theme). So, I worked all night and at 05:30 AM I finished this mockup:
(don’t forget that I’m not an artist 
)
My idea essentially is to use user’s current plasma theme, so If the user uses the default theme he will have a black kickoff otherwise if the user uses fluffy bunny theme, user will have a fluffy bunny themed kickoff. 
Today I started to work on it: I created a new branch called ckickoff, I removed some lines of code and I switched from Plasma::Applet to Plasma::PopupApplet.
PopupApplet allows (with a few lines of code) for showing an icon when the plasmoid is on the panel, and showing the whole plasmoid when it’s on the desktop, so now if you place kickoff plasmoid on the desktop you see kickoff launcher and not a K icon.
For now I have nothing more to say except that I’m going to Akademy:
This is what was missing on kickoff.. theme support… Now it is a little out of place…
Keep up the good work
Looks great, except that the shade of gray surrounding the “Favorites”, “Applications” etc buttons should blend in with (ie. be the same as) the black/gray gradient that is present along the border.
This is awesome. I don’t think that the current Kickoff menu looks terrible, but it think it would definitely be improved by having better desktop integration.
Looks neat, but my favorite theme is glassified… so i think it will look damn strange with it…
Anyway, having kickoff right on the desktop instead of an icon sounds cool, but not all people would like that
look nice, but IMO “leave” should be deleted, too many option in a menu.
Looks great! And makes a lot of sense.
MUCH better than the current look!
If we can get like this kickoff in the next release it will be more than wonderful.
Very nice.
This is a really good development. I think one of the reasons I don’t use kickoff is because it looks so ugly. (I use the classic menu style.) This improvement may actually make me switch.
Thank you for creating this mockup. As the Kickoff menu is currently one of the least integrated (and most frequently used) parts of Plasma, adapting to the user’s theme will greatly enhance the overall KDE4 experience.
Very nice work! I think this integrates a lot better with the Plasma look.
I’d definitely like to see this in 4.2
AMAZING!
perfect
kickoff is becoming bery beautiful
Speaking as an artist…
This rocks! Much slicker. Fits the theme better and looks great!
If I was going to be ultra picky I’d round the bottom corners of the grey square at the bottom as much as the rounding of the top corners. I’d also and add the “drag handle” to resize the menu back at the top right corner.
Looks like a fab step forward overall. So… will we see it for 4.2?
Looks amazing, I find the current look of kickoff to be one off the only things that lets down the hotness of the kde4 desktop
I like the idea a lot and agree that Kickoff doesn’t really fit in as well as it could, but I think you should go one step further. I think the actual menus in Kickoff should be bright-on-dark, so that e.g. under the default theme, the menus will have the same colors as the task manager. Your mockup looks good, but I still think the actual menu sticks out, being too bright.
My .2 cents. Great that you’re looking into this!
Nice
It can be improved of course, but I think you’re in the right track
Like I said before, classy!
You could eventually trick me into loving Kickoff
Yes, you are right.
Kickoff seems nowadays something out of place. The menu should be concordant with the plasma theme.
Hope this will be implemented for 4.2.
Great Idea, and beautiful mock-up!!
But there’s one thing you should think about: The menu should be on the left edge of the screen, so that the return button is on the edge of the screen, too (because of fitts’s law).
Wow.. that looks great
Also cool that you’ve already started porting it.. the only concern coming to my mind is that some (many?) people could want to place the kickoff menu on the desktop and it should stay there as an icon and only expand to the menu when clicked.. as far as I’ve heard from the mailinglists and blogs and so on this is currently not possible with Plasma::PopupApplet…. any chance that will be possible?
Other than that: great work
Cool, but it sholud have a black transparent background not the gray like it allerdy have
Then it will kick ass! 
good job anyway ;]
That looks beautiful
Great idea. Kickoff always seemed a bit off themewise.
Both ideas (1. let kickoff use current plasma theme, 2. show the kickoff launcher instead of an icon when its on the desktop) are so much better than the current situation. I hope these changes will be included in KDE 4.2!!! But I think that the second idea should be configurable, just in case someone prefers the old approach.
I appreciate this effort. I hope that it’s not remendously difficult to pull off, as it will help the user interface consistency throughout plasma…
Now if there was only a way to bring plasma themes selectively into other parts of KDE…
Cheers
I never saw the white kickoff as a problem, but now that you mentioning it – a kickoff that reacts on the current theme would be very nice and wouldn’t look that “alien” to the polished desktop.
I hope that i will see this in 4.2! Nice idea!
Is there an option to keep it as an icon on the desktop if you wanted to? Or perhaps will there be a single-plasmoid containment to “trick” it into being an icon?
Excellent idea.
This concept should really replace the default look of kickoff.
This looks way cool! any chance we’ll see it in trunk soon?
Good initiative! Looks waaay better.
I really like that Mockup, I’d like to see something similar in the KDE 4.2 release! Kickoff is just to important not to look good!
It looks quite nice to me. However, I’m no artist so maybe you should get in touch with KDE artist team so they can give you a better opinion and suggestions
Hej,
that’s looks realy nice. I’m not very good in english, so I write in in german.
Mir gefiehl das Design von Kickoff noch nie, dein Modell wie es aussehen könnte find ich echt klasse, hoffe es wird auch in die realität umgesetzt.
Looks awesome, hope that gets integrated in KDE 4.2
nice suggestion!
How does it go on? I am looking forward using the ckickoff menu