CSS blend modes in Gtk+

As part of my work on Endless, I have to maintain and adapt GNOME applications to better suit our needs. This usually includes fixing bugs, working around limitations of the toolkit, and sometimes implementing new features.

Some time ago, I was asked by multiple designers about the CSS blending modes. This is a well-known feature that is widely used in photo manipulation apps like Photoshop®, and recently Adobe is trying to port this to CSS3 spec.

This allows designers to be more flexible and have a finer control over the rendering, and saves some bandwidth because we don’t have to send the blended image as an asset.

This marvelous feature is starting to see its light in Gtk+.

This is the second time I’m working on something big on Gtk+ (the first one being the Other Locations view) and I’m pretty excited! This was requested by our beloved designer Lapo and also by Endless designers.

When it lands on master, we’ll also have a nice demo in Gtk3-demo app. And, as tradition dictates, a demo video:

In the near future, I plan to work and support more blending operations and CSS properties. Hopefully, this puts Gtk+ ahead of many browsers that doesn’t support these operations. What do you think? Share your comments, ideas and suggestions! 🙂