KDE Pinheiro

Dot 8

2012-01-28T06:30:00.000-08:00

Or 4.8, is Out......

The reason I say dot 8 is that oxygen started with the 4.x series, so now with dot 8 its alive for 4.5 years, its not a juvenile anymore.

Looking back I must say that I'm incredibly happy with what we did over the years, I think its without a question a fantastic proof that OSS people can coordinate efforts in to creating huge pieces of coherent design made by many, for more.

And doing that with the single motivation of sharing the LOVE poured in to that work.

OXYGEN is a true work of LOVE.

From the early days 6 years ago, when me Ken and David started with that ambitious crazy project of redoing all of the KDE icon set, (yeah we thought that was ambitious), when we were going to be sported to do that job by a popular Distro. To the moment the plug was removed from the project. Passing trough the days I thought the future was black (literally i made all the icons black :) ). And the days we thought we could do a widget theme as well, and inviting Thomas L. to help, To the moment we Saw Oxygen explode into everything you see in KDE this days. There was a common element.... The LOVE, the love for a project, the love for a community, the immense fun it was to push the boundaries of what our users expect and appreciate in KDE from a design perspective.

I love working with people Like Hugo, (must mention him for the superb amazing work he as done), were we can almost hallways complete each others sentences.

Must mention our Ruphy (ricardo) that was for a good part, oxygen soul.

Also can't forget Casper, that literally saved us when all seemed lost.

And Marco Martin, for being the amazing person he his.

Ooooo and Martin Gräßlin and the kwin team he represents, you guys rocked the way we talk together.

And the other many many many many people that shared the love of/for Oxygen over the last years.

I know I'm being terribly unjust to not mention you, but you have my LOVE.

And Finally, the most important person of them all YOU, the user of Oxygen, the countless You's that moaned at a icon or a folder I did, that congratulated Hugo on his work, or that still use David's icons, You that LOVE/HATE Oxygen, to you my utmost, thank you.

Today.

Oxygen still as a long way to go. KDE 5.0 is still a distant mirage and oxygen still needs a lot of work, I will keep making what I know best, Icons, I still have over 1000 to do, we now have this missing piece of the Oxygen experience being worked by Vernon, the Oxygen Font.

And we have new people joining in every day like Eshat that is doing all of the 4,8 specific branding Kudos for that.

And by the time the last 4,X comes out Oxygen will be I hope mostly finished... and also I hope dead...:)

And Tomorrow.

Please do not see it as a bad thing, its a good thing, its just part of evolution. And the reason I'm saying this is to start to stern the designers out there to Join oxygen NOW!!! to be part of its future, I can say its has been the most fun personal enrichment experience, of my life. I don't know what will be the future, nor do i think I should as YOU must have a word in it, But I'm super exited about it.

Do you want it to be the good child of oxygen? using many of Oxygen's lines and elements, or the rebel kid that denies is father??? Its is up to you to be part of that amazing journey now!

The challenges Oxygen faced 6 years ago are vastly different from the scenario we have for KDE in the coming years... From a Desktop design paradigm we now have to face several scenarios, several gadgets we need to excel at, wile keeping the same design language, new design paradigms languages we need to keep up with, new generation of users with different expectations and desires.
Plasma helps allot by providing flexible desktop shells that adapt to several different user interaction paradigms, with QML components, porting desktop apps into more different from factors will become less problematic (but they do require massive redesign in most cases). Having a Font will help us a lot manage the increasing range of display DPI's, on the market.

But all of this needs to be fulfilled by a new project.. Oxygen is/was great, join in to be part of the Next great thing OSS does in design.....

Please tell-me if I'm wrong in my assumptions, is this a good bad idea?

The California Gold Rush....

2011-11-17T09:04:00.000-08:00

"brought a flood of treasure seekers...in 1848 " To San Francisco.... in 2011 people are still flooding to the valley in search of .... treasures.... or, well something like that :).

(end of silly introductory text)

I'm not going to try to go against the wave, so I will be attending the Qt Developer Days San Francisco were we will be giving a training on Designing UIs with Qt Quick I like to call this training Qml for designers as it is IMO the main focus of this training. This will be the second time I'm doing this training in just one day, First time was in devdays Munich just a few weeks ago.., and the feed back was good.

Given that I expect that just like in Munich most of the attendees are Developers, and that the full training is over 4 days, we will try to focus a bit on the social/management aspects of dealing with designers that try to do code, we will also do some examples of design techniques that can be used in QML to provide the users with better experiences...

So if you are in the bay area, and have an interest in design and Qt Quick, stop by DevDays2011 to attend our One day training...

Also for the full length of DevDays I will be doing a UX/UI clinic. So if you have an application that you feel could do a bit of UI review, if you have a new project and you are not sure how to start the UI/UX, If you just want to talk about new/old UI design paradigms, You area sure to meet me During DevDays2011 San Francisco... if you want to set up an appointment already send and email to ui-doctor@kdab.com We will see you there...

P.S. Designers do code 2 :D and I published my first application to the OVI store, it is for the most part the same app we used in the Desktop Summit to show the remaining time to the presenters, with a few adaptations/integration with harmattan components. (latest version is 0.2.0 not 0.01, should be up soon)

Must find some time to create a version of this for Plasma.

Stop me please!

2011-11-16T07:11:00.000-08:00

In a couple of weeks, I will need to deliver yet another default wallpaper for KDE's 4.8-49 desktop editions.

So my brain wile starting to go in to “crazy” mode to try to find that specif edge, design pattern, blue, that will make me happy and hopefully our users happy as well... decided to have a look at what we have done over that 4.x series and, I saw a pattern alright.

The most common element in all of them is.... some guy named Nuno...

This must stop NOW!!.... Please help-me....but how??

So I had this idea.... what if some one else can create something better???

We are starting a contest to be ended 4 of December to create a new default wallpaper for 4.8-4.9.

The rules.....

Send it to nuno@oxygen-icons.org subject wallpaper2011 (please use this)
The license for the chosen ones will be LGPL In case they are not selected, they will remain sole property of its creator (I will not publish them).
Minimum size is 1920x1200Bonus points for creating other screen ratios.
Photos are accepted.
Must have a defining element that can be used in kde branding (very important)
Jury, composed by me, Lydia Pintscher, and Ingo Malchow.

Prize..... Having your work used by millions (or close to that :) ). Not having yet another Nuno's wallpaper in your desktop.

Results will be visible in next KDE release, winners will be informed as soon as we know :)

We will chose up to 3 wallpapers only one will be default.

Some side notes..... KDE core branding values, revolve around Elegance, Freedom, and ease of use, we would love to see that in the default wallpaper.

Have fun :)

1996!

2011-10-14T13:36:00.001-07:00

Lets keep it short and to the point!

If we managed to to do all of this in 15 imagine what we can in 15 more?

Back from the Future!

2011-08-15T16:43:00.000-07:00

So I'm back from the desktop summit, were like usual I had good fun meeting up with all my old and new friends.
Had the chance to give a talk about QML, and how I think it can be a major "game changer" for the way we work together and how Designers can be part of the processes and not some one you ask for "this is my app its great, now make it pretty".
Also noted that QML olds lots of dangers, and its not trivial at all to create final polished integrated applications, aka takes more than a decent designer to make it work, ( I repeat coders are designers 2).

Apparently (I have been told) I talk to much and should show more demos :) next year I promise I will tray not to talk ;), (evil idea in the making)

Any way the videos of the talks should be up soon so :)

Also participated in a couple of Bof's about some new exiting stuff Björn Blazazs is hading to his great platform and another called UI clinic were me Björn and Aurelian served as general practitioners to several patients (apps) was really allot of fun for me, I focused on zanshin and scroge and I hope my aspirin tablets caused more good than bad ;), any way I hope we can do it again for future meetings and do it for more hours.

Now I need a random picture of an icon to finish tis post..... hummmm.
Yeap one of the demos was of K3B (3B stands for burn baby burn) fast links screen done in QML

Desktop Sumit or paper planes

2011-08-04T13:48:00.000-07:00

In a couple of hours I will be entering a slightly modified version of the example up above in direction to Not so Sunny Berlin, Hoping I will meet some old friends and recent friends, and make quite a few more along the way.

I will be giving a talk about a very Hot topic also involving paper planes.. QtQuick and its language QML, how I feel about it and how i think its a great thing but also a terrible one, if in the wrong hands.

O BTW have you noticed that 4.7 is out of the door including some new folder icons ??? :) more interested to know if you hate them I'm interested in all the people that after a period of disliking them now think they are better than the old ones.

Icon fun....

2011-05-19T16:46:00.000-07:00

After mostly finishing the great folder redo in oxygen, and wile trying to achieve an effect in QML (trying to do a shutter like open/close animated effect), I ended up with a to fancy svg to let it rot on my hard drive, so, and if you have the shutter part done you can do the remaining bits, and that gives you.....
A icon, tadaaaaa! instant Fun :D.... or should I say instant DSLR fun :)...

Qt Quick and QML

2011-03-24T16:50:00.000-07:00

Been wanting to do this post for some time now, but mostly because I never did got decent recordings of the desktop I postponed it, until today....

First the video...

Ok so its fairly simple demos of what you can do with QML one kinda of a design cliché, but in this case they serve the propose...note# they run way faster/smoother than this its just that the screen capture program is not perfect..

the first one is really an example of how easy it is to create a OSX like thing... the core logic of the demo is around 80 lines of code :). wen I actually made it the first time, the way I implemented had each of the icons having its how independent and overlapping hit area just to see if it was possible, It is, but I don't recommend :).

The second is something I'm working on with Sergio to replace the diary view in Kontact.
Bottom line.... I love QML and By "love" I mean I LOOOOOVE it :D.

Its the freedom it gives-me to create completely new interface and interactions, (yes I have been doing stuff a bit more complex that those little silly demos), its going to the pixel level and fixing that millisecond animation till its just perfect, and then deciding the idea sucks and redoing it another completely different way, its working with it much like I work with design tolls by applying layers and filters, is all of that and the fact that its not hard to code with once you get in to declarative way of code.

BUT... (there is always a "but") with all this freedom great dangers come, To me this is designers tool not to be used by developers* you can make stunning UI's with it but its also easy to fail spectacularly.... The main obvious target for it is the touch interfaces, but that does not mean you cant use it on other places....

For a good time I even thought that the use of it in traditional desktop should be banned :) I don't think this now, and am tempted to say that you can use it any ware.......BUT ok this "BUT" is extremely important the way you can fail are huge and if you are gonna use it pleeease find a proven good designer to help you, heck if you manage to convince the designer to do it himself I will guarantee you that the designer will love it...

I think we can in the future provide some sort of well defined use cases, solutions and elements from QML land that you can apply safely in your app. I also hope that we can attract many more UI designers to OSS/KDE land with this tool. Time will tell.

*not saying developers cant do design I know many that do fantastic design. The problem is if you are not an experienced-maniac-pixel-perfection-zealot chances of failure are big.

Work as usual.

2011-03-03T16:37:00.001-08:00

Its safe to say that the 4.6 release was great. Overall the impression and feedback I received was that this is our "best release ever", I agree with that... Kudos to every one involved..

So I'm back to work and right about now I been sorting out stuff that I had on my HUGE to-do list in oxygen icons.... for example the Digikam face recognition feature for which the icons above belong to.

Other than the same old stuff that I do, I have been spending allot of time playing with Qt Quick qml, tool that I simply love by now, and that enables me to start doing stuff directly for apps... and doing the UI experience without a middle man...
Qml is simple great but is not to be used lightly its in essence a designers tool that gives you incredible control over the UI but with great power comes great responsibility, its incredibly easy to create absolute terribly bad UI with it, so if you plan on using qml for your app be sure to find a designer to help you. Try to motivate him to actually do the UI himself... I guarantee you he will love it.

Showing qml is not as easy as showing icons dough, and it usually requires a video... Will try to sort out a way to post videos here without losing quality.

Till then have fun and keep on rocking.

Elegance is the new word.

2011-01-26T08:12:00.000-08:00

A new version of our desktop experience is out :), as usual I'm extremely proud to be a part of it, I hope all of you enjoy it as much as we enjoy making it :)

Now its Party time :) I will be attending the KDE Release party in Porto, hope to see you there ;).

Finaly

2011-01-07T17:30:00.000-08:00

This post, is short but its about something that started out as something that should be very quick to do, (replacement of the paper in the mime-types), into a complete remake of all of the mime-types this time in all sizes.

Representing something like, +/-244 icons, over 3200 files, many hours of work, this is a work I'm proud to have done, but I hope I don't have to do any time soon.... Overall I'm very pleased with them. And tomorrow, I should start to fix some minor bugs in the set. And get back to action icons doing, applications, etc etc.

The new 4,6 desktop release from KDE is coming in very soon, and we are very happy with all the improvements we made into it.... I hope you all enjoy it as much as we enjoy making it....

I leave you the last icon I did for the set......

Its the news mime type in glorious 16x16 pixels very different from the 256x256

The magic that we do :)

2010-12-12T15:22:00.001-08:00

We do icon themes, we do Qt themes, plasma themes, sound themes, cursor themes, color themes, website themes, we do themes for KDE, so what themes might be missing for the KDE user?????
Hum.... what about, GTK themes..... yes I know you use GTK apps in KDE, I do...., so and because its Xmas time and all and, "santa" HUGO is so nice, we give you OXYGEN-GTK have fun :)

33 years old!

2010-12-08T16:09:00.000-08:00

Today I am turning 33.
Its one of those classical ages, were you have to think about what you have done so far and what you are going to do next.
So what did I do so far?..... nothing much except having a lot of fun, for example today I managed to get the 32x32 icons below 200, 198 to go :)
And this points me to what I'm going to do next, yes 198 icons :)

Hope I can keep having fun with KDE, and make it fun for you to use it as well, .....

Its the end of the world, and KDE!

2010-12-07T19:31:00.000-08:00

So KDE is coming to an end :).

I think they got it all wrong, what was finally finished was the 48x48 mimetypes not KDE.
So today I started to kill KDE a bit more :) 32x32 :) enjoy!

Only 227 icons to do in this size :)

We have work for you!

2010-11-22T11:50:00.000-08:00

So first things first, last post i mentioned something about 48x48 icons and a promise is a promise.....

Ok as I said in last post the improvements to small sizes should be less visible, still as you can see in the side image they are real....

Its all about Elegance (yesterday I could not remember the blasted word ,sorry Gamaral), elegance is accomplished in the details, we are still very far away from a truly elegant icon set but we are getting closer :).
As you can see its really small details that make the difference, but then again it is in those small details that may reside the differentiation of what we do and what every one else is doing...

There is one problem though, this is a lot of work, and by alot I want to say something like 2-8 hours each day for the past month or so and I'm still in the middle of it... Have I mentioned that there is about 1200 icons still to do ?

Had that to all of the other KDE works, and I have a problem....
I need help :)
I'm completely aware that learning to do icons, specially, doing good icons is a trade that takes some time to master, and if I want some help I must be willing to spend some time teaching new people on how to do it....

So with that in mind I would like to invite you (well not you, just the "you" that are eligible to enter the Google Code-in 2010 :) ) to accept the initial challenge I propose that is to do or update 3, just 3 icons in one week of work, I will mentor you, the only thing i request is that you have some basic skills with a vector drawing tool such as inkscape karbon or illustrator... if you successfully finish this task i will create new ones with increasing difficulty...

So have fun!

You can find out the open tasks at http://www.google-melange.com/gci/program/list_tasks/google/gci2010 and the dot story at the dot, :), any doubts about how this works ask Lydia, she has more details here.

Bye bye 64 hello 48.

2010-11-20T17:17:00.000-08:00

The size 64x64 took me more time that what I was originally expecting, not because they were particularly complex to make but simply because I was to busy with other more important KDE related things, with a new release of our desktop in its 4.6 incarnation coming out, we get extra amounts of work to do, plus given the relative success of the oxygen project all projects want to look good and request our assistance, so I end up juggling a lot of subprojects at the same time.

I'm not complaining or anything, its great, and very different from the way things used to be not so long ago, think this change is probably the greatest accomplishment of the oxygen project.

But getting back to the subject of this post, yes 240 icons later the size 64x64 is done and next (now) we will move on to size 48x48., so i think I'm still on time for 4.6.

They look much better than they did IMO but the improvement for the sizes 16x16 22x22 32x32 will be less pronounceable as the ones we had were made for size 32x32.... still its worth the effort.....

In 4.6 i hope we can improve the animation of scaling the icons is rendered in dolphin its just a nitpick but I think it can be better...

Because of my modus operandi now I need to leave a positive message...... so here it goes......

My next post should have icons in size 48x48, lots and lots of them.

incredible no? :)

Cheers, and remember, have fun!

This post's are getting boring no?

2010-11-12T16:45:00.000-08:00

I come here I do a "dent" like post were I show something I have done, and the progress of the work, get some feedback, and we move on....

So in order to not brake the cycle I'm forced to show a couple of icons, here they are :)

Then I will make some comments on them like "this are 64x64 icons" Dohhh :)
Next I will say something like .... "made 95 of this icons".
And in the end leave a positive remark about the future "tomorrow I hope to do 50 more".

This would conclude my post.

I'm booooooring :D.

P.S. Its great fun to do the work and show its progress here, but I noticed that my last posts were kinda similar, sorry about that.... We are working on many different things for the 4.6 release. And I'm confident it will be our best one ever.

P.S.2 see I have done it again, ending the post with a positive line about the future. I'm really boring. :D

take care

Just like before!

2010-11-09T18:13:00.000-08:00

Just like some days ago, I finished another set of mime-types now in size 128x128, and have already started with the 64x64 size, as you could see in the previous post... so 240 icons done 240 icons to go :)

I'm sure there are all sorts of little and big errors in them and wen I'm done with the lot I will try to fix them..
Have fun!

Someone asked?

2010-11-09T01:58:00.000-08:00

"Anonymous said...: 6:00 PM; I’m not sure whether this is the right place for this, but may I request a mimetype icon for Lilypond? It’s a music sheet engraving program very similar to LaTeX (www.lilypond.org)."

Well no, its not the best place to ask for icons, the best place would be in oxygen's SVN playground were we keep a series of lists of required icons.

But in this case and since the icon was already made I decided to show what we had done to it :)

Hope you like it (I know I liked it since it was the first time I did decorative typography) I'm not unhappy how the clave looks .... 128x128 is a bit cluttered.... but well "this" icon thing is fastly becoming the art of what we can do in less time possible to as many icons you can . With time it will get better. :)

PS the over contrast is a result of a quick montage in inkscape that resulted in sup pixel problems that I solved in gimp but ended up looking to sharp the real ones in svn look better...

A couple of days!

2010-11-07T11:28:00.000-08:00

A couple of days, well the last 2 at least I think have been the most productive of my life, yesterday I committed way over 100 128x128 mimetipes in to svn (only 75 missing), also today I mostly finished a concept for a KDE website, and I am now working in kolab.org refreshed identity, that I think as some good potential.... we will see.... as usual the snapshot of yesterdays work... Crazy as it may be, I love it, KDE is a product of LOVE, the love of many many crazy wonderful people.
And thankfully there are a couple of days wen everything just works(TM).
Have fun!

Done with 256 hey 128.

2010-11-06T10:14:00.000-07:00

Today I mostly finished the 256x256 versions of the mime-types, and already started with the 128x128... only 161 to go meaning that today I made (scaled) about 80 icons, a complete record for me.

Only 32 to go :)

2010-11-01T11:10:00.000-07:00

Small update on the status of the new mime-types I'm getting ready for the 4.6 release of Oxygen icon set for KDE. As you can see we have some additions to our collection like the Qt-quick qml mime-type, or the color profiles one. Only 32 are missing now :D

As long as the last, but better.

2010-10-17T16:37:00.000-07:00

Just another small post to show progress on the new mimetypes for the KDE 4.6 :).
I have done about 150 in the 256x256 size and there is about 87 to go....
My original idea was just to update the "paper" but ended up doing a bit more. Hope you like the result.

A small long post.

2010-10-10T13:45:00.000-07:00

The last few days i decided to start refreshing the mime types of oxygen... started with the large ones that were looking really old by now.
I hope you guys like them, I'm only half way there :)

4.5 is free!

2010-08-10T10:21:00.000-07:00

KDE is a lot of things, today we give you new versions of the KDE Development Platform, the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, today we give you 4.5.0.

There are as usual many small, and big improvements that you can read on www.kde.org. I feel honoured to be a small part of it.

Its wonderful to see that, the efforts we engaged few years back are starting to pay off, that Artwork and Branding cooperation with the distros is really shaping up, special kudos to OpenSuse, Kubuntu, Mandriva, and many countless other distros like Caixa Mágica, for sharing the work, cooperating and becoming part of KDE.

I would like to send a special thanks to the people at Mandriva, (neoclust, and mikala rock!) for providing-me and others, with constant builds of the most recent KDE in trunk that I could test and work on, there are many ways we can work together and help each other mutually, this is one of them, thank you :), grab your build now from one of your kde mirrors.

KDE Pim Mobile

2010-08-04T08:46:00.000-07:00

So for the last months we have been working really hard to, port our great PIM software to the mobile world, and I must say it is a challenge, the rules all change and most of what you know does not fit the specificities of the interaction methods, the size and dpi of the screens, or even how something as simple as a gradient does not work as you expect.
Had that, to learning new exiting technologies like QML and starting to do working mock-ups with them that developers can interpret much better, and in some cases implement directly. (ok this was only a problem for me, but hey if I can do it any one can :) )

And wen you try do a no compromise, solution for the software, meaning that no major feature is removed, you find your self with a monumental challenge.

The good part is that so far we managed to overcome all major problems with what I believe in some cases are really innovative, new interaction paradigms, example the folder selection method we created. Also good is that we now are starting to do the polishing, and theming part, that will make the app prettier, and more appellative . one example of that is the splash screen we created that now shows up Wen you boot the application. In the near future we will show a progress element and some notifications on what is going on.

(This is a scaled down version of the splash screen (the real one is 4 times bigger), notice the background noise is there to avoid weird effects normally seen in subtle gradients on mobile screens)

Akademy 2010

2010-06-25T11:45:00.000-07:00

It as passed a long time since I last blogged, but the reason for this is the best reason of them all... I really cant find the time for blogging as I'am very busy with all the fun stuf we been working on.

As a kind of resume.
1. KDEmobile PIM work is great, the applications are really shaping up and its fun to work with such brilliant people.

2. Oxygen work as done yet more fundamental steps into provide a immersive and polished experience to the end user. (tons of bug-fixes in oxygen and a lot of pixel polishing gives me the confidence to say this is the best oxygen ever)

3. Preparing a lightning talk with my old great friend David, about some really easy and simple tips about UI design, and how to make applications a more fun experience to the end user. Also we will do a BOF were we hope to do some real app's Ui's improvements (every one is invited)

4. Helping the KDE e.v. foundation along with Eugene (Eugene did most of the work :) ) in the great join the game. Its a great idea and I hope all of you join the game as-well. Also provided a bit of help in the artwork for Akademy.

5. Doing icons, (yes that never stops), and I found again the pleasure in doing them. After spending the last years of my life mostly doing icons I have to say that for a moment I was fed up with them :)

The last icons we did (yesterday and today) its a couple of status user icons in regard to meetings.

So see you all in Finland

I'm going

2010-02-17T02:30:00.000-08:00

This Friday I should be going to the Oxygen meeting #3 it is a joint event betwin, Kwin Plasma and Oxygen a sort of "all your rotten eggs in one big big basket" :).

Personally I think this is one of the most important meetings for Oxygen. As i think that oxygen in 4.5 will reach maturity on the set of goals we decided a few years ago (5?).

Oxygen set up to be a great number of things in what could be considered a silly over ambitious project. That would be...

A complete icon theme for KDE and the KDE ecosystem. ( we ended up doing a bit more than this)

A windeco theme. (that blended in perfectly with the window itself)

A qt theme that would blend in, and was coherent, yet innovative in a classical non obstructive way, that was fully animated not because we could but because it creates a more polished experience with more intuitive and natural flow of information.

A cursor theme.

A sound theme.

A plasma theme that should never be confused with the qt theme but yet retain the important similitudes that create a coherent desktop.

A complete revamp of the websites designs.

A general design platform for KDE, that could prove that open source can do good design.

And we did all of this and more, we did more than a plasma theme we did 2. we remade the designs for the websites more than once (must repeat kudos to Eugene for is wonderful design work on th most recent incarnation of kde.org).

Not all is done for example the icon set is something that should give me work for about 3-4 more years, the windeco still needs some work on the shadows so we can get them more configurable and 100% perfect. the qt theme still needs some more adjustments and there are a couple of things I'm still not totally happy with, others that will get better with improvements on the qt front. Plasma theme is still a exiting WIP we keep on coming up with new ideas to make the user experience more polished and enjoyable.

But the bulk of the work is done I would say that from the original goal we reached 80% done (apart from the icon set) and those reaming 20% are the really hard part that need's time and testing and sometimes that bit of luck that comes with a creative process.

So what I'm taking to this meeting is mostly questions, what is next?

I can see 3 possible paths:

Create a new qt theme, something with a more "wow" factor that could appeal to a different kinda of user, a theme that used the full potential of qt animations in a very rainbow experience that would make you happy just from looking at it, something that would make your productivity drop by at least 50% :).

Start taking care of the individual apps UI's, KDE as made huge progress in this area, apps are way less clustered than what they used to be, but just like oxygen is not finished, some apps have their UI's in need of a "closure" a touch of design and usability, that would match the oxygen experience.

Just do icons and focus on finish Oxygen.

A few months back I made a poll right here asking what should we put more effort in, and the bulk of the requests were to finish the windeco and Qt theme, tanks to the Oxygen developers we are getting really close to having that "todo" mostly done. So i ask again what should we focus on next?

As promised in last blog post here is a couple of pointers from Hugo Pereira (one of our main developers) on the stuff that you can tweak in oxygen style but is not present on the UI. (no I'm not a fan of all you can do in a UI, I think its a good way to hide the simple stuff and scare most people away from playing with it we hope we can bring in more options to the UI in a "less boxes and check's and technical gibberish" way, and no we are not happy with what we have now there we hope we can provide more options on the future as i said)

so a word from Hugo

for the style, most animations can be turned on/off independently one from the other, and their duration can be tweaked.The non UI options are following (with hopefully self-explicit names):
// this goes under the [Style] section of the oxygenrc file
AnimationsEnabled=true // this is the global flag, present in the UI
GenericAnimationsEnabled=true // all buttons/editors hover/focus
ToolBarAnimationsEnabled=true
MenuBarAnimationsEnabled=true
MenuAnimationsEnabled=true
ProgressBarAnimationsEnabled=true

GenericAnimationsDuration=150
ToolBarAnimationsDuration=150
MenuBarAnimationsDuration=150
MenuAnimationsDuration=150
ProgressBarAnimationsDuration=250
StackedWidgetTransitionsEnabled=false // tab transitions, also present in the UI
LabelTransitionsEnabled=false
ComboBoxTransitionsEnabled=true
LineEditTransitionsEnabled=true

StackedWidgetTransitionsDuration=150
LabelTransitionsDuration=75
ComboBoxTransitionsDuration=75
LineEditTransitionsDuration=150

For the decoration: // this goes under the [Windeco] section of oxygenrc

UseAnimations=true // its a non UI unfortunately
AnimateTitleChange=false // this is only for title smooth transition when window title changes
AnimationsDuration=150
UseNarrowButtonSpacing=false // reduce the spacing between buttons
UseOxygenShadows=true

Have fun playing with the values :) personally i made the animations much longer than default, the values are in mseconds.

It is done!

2010-02-09T15:22:00.000-08:00

KDE s.c. 4.4 is out of the door, I think its by far the most polished version of the KDE desktop we have released, plasma is looking very nice, there are lots of new features and one can feel more integration between all the pillars of KDE.

But what I'm truly happy with is with our little baby, Oxygen. Specially the kwin decoration and the qt theme, we have jump in terms of end user experience by at least one order of magnitude, almost all elements have animations that are unobstructive to the user, a HUGE number of bugs have been closed, I was trying to remember all the improvements we introduced in this release of oxygen and I lost count, honestly have no idea, its more than 50 of that I'm sure.

In the next few days, and because i know some people like to have more options we will share with you guys ways to extend the number of options in oxygen theming and animations ;).

Oxygen icon theme goes on as usual we now have over 5000 files that cover something like 1300 different icons. The HI def icons really shine providing 256x256 pixel icons that are very useful for marketing, and website presentations.

We made over 6 usability studies on the icons that then resulted on several icon changes and refurbishment, also got us valuable information about our icon user base and their expectations. (more will come)

We now have a proper WWW team, this is not a Oxygen thing but something that we are involved with, results can be seen in the great new kde.org site Its an amazing statement of the power of our community, and what can be done wen different people with different skills sets can do wen pushing in the same direction. Think we can expect great things from this group.

So today. is a day to have fun and experience what is IMO our best KDE s.c. Desktop version ever.

A bit more contrast and the smaler versions.

2010-01-21T18:29:00.001-08:00

So flowing the feedback from yesterdays blog post here is an update on the status of the icon.

Did not made the arrow green or blue for several reasons, most of them that have to so with the over usage of arrows and the fact that the green one already have a more document local browsing meaning to them.
Plus I think that this one that pop up from the envelop itself makes sense to me at least, and avoid hading unnecessary visual clutter.One thing don't judge a icon contrast by the way it looks on white background specially if this contrast is made with alpha shadow, the white tends to fade it off.

The same icon on actual oxygen use...
Might still play with the 22x22 version a tad bit but overall I am happy with it...
For 16x16 there is a option to just use the arrow like we do in many mail icons, we could just use the tiny arrow that is the defining element. Maybe....

Time for fixing :D

2010-01-20T14:20:00.000-08:00

Today Björn Balazs published the results from the last survey an the results point out that I should do a new "send mail" icon, the old one was very nice IMO it avoided the use of an arrow, that we end up using in action icons way more that I would like to. But against facts there is no possible argumentation. :)

So I think this might work a bit better.So, better? worse ??? What do you think?
I would like to avoid mailboxes and stuff like that as they scale pretty badly.

# P.S. in the last days I have been working on encrypt document, sign, and lock, type of icons (as you can see in my identi.ca thingy) and probably the icons in Kmail that deal with that issue will be a bit restyled mostly encryption that right now uses the same metaphor that "lock" does and causes some confusion.

A very small post!

2010-01-14T16:32:00.000-08:00

So KDE S.C. 4.4 is almost out there, and we in oxygen are very happy with our work, there is a lot of polishement in it and we think the its one step closer to what we hope to be a complete experience.
The drawback of it is that "busy" is the word we most pronounce in a day to day basis, and it as been undermining my attempts to blog or even to make more icons for oxygen.... Still here is a couple of icons made in the last days, it is mostly koffice icons.

Oooo and Happy new year :)

So its Xmas Time again :)

2009-12-23T10:03:00.000-08:00

It seams it was only yesterday I did my first Xmas decorative thing for KDE, but it was already 5 years ago, wow time flies :)

2010 promises to be a great year for KDE, 4.4 simply rocks, Oxygen will have a joint meeting next February with the plasma people, and some Kwin people as well, so great fun coming.
For now have fun and be happy :D MERRY XMAS!

P.S. Fixed the link and haded a new almost wallpaper version off it (its not an wallpaper) here

Kmail icon test

2009-12-09T10:32:00.000-08:00

So because I redefine the meaning of the word busy, I had been letting the usability studies fall behind terribly, but the good think about being KDE is that there is so much of us willing to step in and help. In this case it was Björn Balazs that created this test and I warn you its not an easy one :) have fun with it :).

P.S. its my birthday today so thanks Björn for the gift ;).

KDE what it always was

2009-11-24T18:05:00.000-08:00

To me KDE was never Software, it was the people, so I'm very happy to be able to say today "I AM KDE" :)

I hope I can find some time to do a secreencast of all of the new goodies in the oxygen theme. 4.4 will be in my opinion the best desktop the KDE people has ever produced.

Oxygen screencast

2009-10-26T18:40:00.000-07:00

So i spent a few minutes setting up this screencast of the progress so far in Oxygen Animations, unfortunately there is no real good place to store the ogg file :( and the youtube compression make it look a bit bad (please view in hi def)
Any way enjoy we will publish more as soon as we get more animations in.
a torrent to a better avi file.

A small post for a not so small screenshot .

2009-10-09T12:07:00.000-07:00

If you are that type of user that uses KDE from trunk them this might not be new to you, but for the rest of the world here goes a screenshot showing some of the stuff Hugo Pereira and I have been working on in Oxygen windeco.

Anew color theme that might work better on some less optimal screens, the windeco is now much more configurable and you can set its to be extremely thin or bigger if you so desire, the active glow as been improved, we have new windec buttons that have better contrast and great animation effects.
If you can build oxygen windeco from trunk please have a test go with it for a few days and tell us what you think of it.

What have I been up to?

2009-10-01T17:36:00.000-07:00

So much stuff.

First thing first, icons yep that what I do mostly, one of the nice aspects of working in KDAB is being closer to people that work on several other stuff in kde that you tend not to talk in a regular basis, like Pim people for example, so after work latly I have been doing lots and lots of pim icons, its a total remake of the ones we had, basacly making them look a bit better on a new color sckeam im prepping up for KDE 4.4 and Oxygen.

(nothing major just a fix for low quality screens that make oxygen widget theme look like "snow white", no no preview yet I'm still testing some solutions and maybe we will need to tweak oxygen main gradients a bit, btw hpereira as been working on several aspect of oxygen as well, and the new oxygen windeco looks great).

Any way back to icons, so this is just a snapshot of what I been up to as oxygen and icons goes since last post.

P.S. not all icons are mail icons obviously.

Oxygen is dead, long live Oxygen

2009-09-15T04:47:00.000-07:00

Today Hugo Pereira Da Costa hacker extraordinare of Nitrogen, the very popular window decoration theme in kde-look, merged it into Oxygen, this means that we will be able to have just one theme that can do what oxygen and ozone did and much much more. We will keep working on new options for its and removing options that can be removed. The shadow/glow generation code is being enhanced to offer more options and better glow. It introduces a new approach to the division between oxygen and ozone dilemma, that was suggested by another great hacker/designer Thomas Luebking, that ofers a nice option to people that want to color active and inactive windows in different colors, without making it look completely awkward.

"The oxygen style and window decoration have been the primary reason which made me switch to kde4 a couple of years ago. The window decoration at that time had however too few configuration options to my taste, and so Nitrogen (a fork of the original Oxygen) was born, then posted to kde-look. I got pretty excited when it was added to kde SVN repository about a month ago due to its (unexpected) popularity on kde-look, as a replacement for the previous Ozone fork. Today's even more thrilling, since we went one step further and merged Oxygen and Nitrogen, in order to have a one-and-only full-featured Oxygen decoration for the next kde release. The new Oxygen has customizable button and window border sizes, configurable drop-down shadows, and provides a nice highlight to the active window title bar in a way that is similar (but nicer looking IMHO) than what Ozone would do. It also allows one to define window-specific settings that overwrite the defaults. Not to mention that this brings me an official ticket into the wonderful Oxygen team, and we're all pretty excited about future plans and new features we will bring to users soon, starting from where we are now."

Hugo Pereira Da Costa....

Don't you love Open Source?

Its a great day.

Random part II (the revenge of svn)

2009-09-12T18:28:00.000-07:00

Today I was working as usual and trying to commit the icons I just finished, wen I realized I can't not today, should not be anything important for me, I can commit tomorrow, but for some reason I couldn't work on other icons, for some reason I see the commit as closure if I don't do it I cant move on, Interesting how the human brain works.

Any way I thought I could spend some time to show some of the icons I did in the past days.

There are some Scribus Kplato kdevelop and KdePim icons there, and they are all in svn :)

For the future.

2009-08-20T16:27:00.000-07:00

In the past few days I have been working in so many different things I have a hard time keeping track of all of them, but all of them are moving in a reasonable pace, and its great seeing all the pieces falling in to place one by one.
One thing that as been bugging me for the longest time, is the fact that plasmoids need icons, and to be honest I was not to excited about doing icons for all of them, still I was not happy about the fact that they were hijacking oxygen icons and creating a visual mess were one would not know if that was the plasmoid or the application the icon belonged to.

So we really needed to fix this issue.... today I think I found a possible answer, the basic idea is that all plasma apps (plasmoids) use the same base icon same shape, they can simply make one by placing an image under it and cropping it correctly. We could bend the rules a bit and in some cases place meaningful objects on top of it like a finger a arrow etc. but still keeping the basic shape. That way we will avoid confusion, make it easy for plasmoid developers to get an icon, and have a kick ass looking set of icons.

Well this is the basic idea, my first implementation of it
Its not finished and its just the basic shape still a long way to go, but think its really "clicable", witch is important for touch based devices were I see this little applications to have the brightest future..

Random icons

2009-08-11T17:17:00.000-07:00

This is just a really quick post to show some of the icons i been working in the past few days, mostly kdevelop icons and office like ones, also made a couple for Kontact. And made a new overlay for unmounted devices.

Hope you like it, couple more done, an uncountable number to go :-) .

In case you are wondering the first ones are part of a group (kdevelop) were the particular theming uses special green, and they can be showed out of context so the context part is needed...

More office icons!

2009-08-07T18:25:00.000-07:00

Lately, like for the last 2 months or so I have been doing 1 or 2 icons before going to bed for one of the list of icons I have in my todo, and that work's! Those lists are gueting smaller and smaller, Scribus list for example is completed in what was the pure freedesktops extended list. (I'm now doing the other ones).

Also the list for kdevelop is going well and should be done soonish.
But we have another list that we are just starting to make, the koffice list, me and mostly Dario Andres (known for is work at bugs.kde.org the bugtracker and the crash handlert). And just because oxygen is such a complete theme we found out that about 50% of those icons are already done without moving a finger or in this case a cursor :).
But some times its does not work like that.
This night was doing some office icons for Scribus, this ones....

The first one is crop and the second is a updater of text frames via external to the document a text element.
Because crop is also used in koffice I decided to mark it checked in that list, but it turns out we didn't had it in that list we completely missed a folder that had nothing less than 60 icons :( and we might have missed more, so 2 more done 60 more to do is todays total :).

Just wanted to say that I am.

2009-08-04T10:15:00.000-07:00

And I think any one that works with the wonderful group of people KDE is, as to feel inspired too.
Congrats KDE for 4.3.

P.S. If you don't like how it looks, be sure we do our best. Some people like it personally I love it. But there is no fits all solutions, for starters screens have a deep influence on how the entire thing looks and most screens out there are rather bad.

A new test!

2009-08-03T13:15:00.000-07:00

So the k3b test ended with a record of people taking it, more than 7000, we should publish a resume of the test results with the most interesting results we had, overall I can say that the icons we had submitted all except one passed the test, the only one that did not passed the test was erase CD that a been changed to this...

Seams most people think this is a better metaphor than the one I provided. Cool!

So in the same place as last time we now are featuring a new test for kdevelop

There are some changes made in the test, now it includes 5 languages so that language differences and localization can be addressed better than in the K3b study, also I'm really not expecting extremely high good results one this one because its extremely abstract concepts, and maybe only people that work with IDE's can tell the difference any way as usual every one is invited to take the test and there are no wrong answers. Also let me send a special thanks to every one that helped me setting up this new test could have not done it without you, THANKS.

KDE People!

2009-07-23T16:36:00.000-07:00

I love KDE and the main reason for that was allays obvious to me, that KDE was much more than a desktop environment, KDE was the people, the love they put into it. I completely stole the totally amazing photos Marijn Kruisselbri nk took, to make that little collage.
On an unrelated note, but truly amazingly event to me, I will be working for KDAB and this will allow me to keep doing design work, and contribute to KDE as well. All of this made my day and also my year. Yes I'm very very happy.

Fixing a bug, some icons and working on the test.

2009-07-20T17:46:00.000-07:00

Firstly the icons, its nothing special just some not so exciting icons, I did for the office set,connect and unconnect text bits nothing much, there is also a new eraser for the CD I just committed.

We also managed to fix some visual bugs in air task-bar theme that were making the inactive buttons much to similar to the active one, think its much better now, and it was backported into 4.3 yey for notmart. Also made some minor changes to the decorations in air plasma them, its prettier now... (screenshots as soon as I get a working trunk here.)

Last, managed to show a preview of the upcoming test to the people at kdevelop people and I am currently waiting for the review. (this time we will have German, English and Spanish versions...more coming)
So as my friend Guilhermo Amaral says TTFN (tahhh taahh for now) :) see you guys tomorrow.

We are getting there.

2009-07-18T19:13:00.000-07:00

Around 4-5 years ago, the appeal project project created Oxygen, original people in the creation of oxygen are my good friends David Vignoni, (The wonderful master of nuvola), and Kenneth Wimer, (the man behind all of kde 3.x artwork management).
I just joined later on on a invitation, over time I grew fond of this 2 guys, and discovered, much of myself in them, also there were my teachers. David as a master in checking for details and always trying to overcome ourself, and Ken in the skills one as to acquire to produce something meaningful in OSS.
I somtimes forget to say thanks to this 2 persons, you guys ROCK, you changed my life.

Now all of this to say that 4.3 is around the corner, 6 more hard working months have passed and oxygen is more alive than ever. And we could not have done it without the help of KEN and David.

3 dots looking into the future, yes this is dot 3 . IT seams just yesterday we started making "prettier pictures".
Maybe tomorrow I have more icons to show, the ones I did today are boring :)

Develop, develop develop!

2009-07-17T13:48:00.000-07:00

As promised yesterday, today I show some of the icons we have been working with the kdevelop guys. This are just first tries to get them right, I don't do development and I need help designing them.Today I tested the..... test we have been working on for kdevelop, and i think I failed the questions in the test :). Next week we should debut the new test stay tunned...

Back to work as usual.

2009-07-16T17:38:00.000-07:00

Mofux asked me just a few minutes ago how come I stooped blogguing like I was, and i said that " I don't have much time for that and honestly all my professional issues are getting on my nerves".
But that got me to think that the best I can do is do what I do that is (working, and talking about it), well at least it doesn't hurt, and I can still have some one telling-me "We just copy vista windows 7 or what ever", (I don't really mind that anymore). I love everyone.
So in my long quest to keep myself busy, I found new itches to scratch, and some old ones as well...

itch #1 koffice like icons,

itch #2 Kdevelop icons, (screen-shot tomorrow)

itch #3 making new tests (probably about kdevelop)

itch #4 making reports for the old tests (got some volunteers to help-me on that, should be great fun).

itch #5 get back on all the people that I talked to during Akademy on all the work we are supposed to do.

and hitch #6 get back to daily blogging.

This should keep me away from thinking about real life and other nonsense like that :).

Take the test

2009-07-09T11:10:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from the GCDS. and had a great time there with all of the KDE people and some of the gnome people as well.
I had the opportunity to finally meet the tango people and they are great :). Juts like us they the best they can to make the open source desktop rock.
My talk was about 2 things, the KDE open service, (got great feedback from several distros about it) and the making the desktop you need... (another way of saying I don't guess what the user wants and its better to ask).

So every 15 days we will be conducting icon test on http://www.oxygen-icons.org/survey/, there is no wrong answer just good ones, ask everybody you know to take it, I'm very interested on the opinions of the people that use the computer occasionally and never used KDE.
The first test is about some icons in K3B, its very fast to do the test, follow the link and see all the wonderful stuff http://www.apliki.de/ did for us, find out more in http://www.usability-methods.com/en.
The first feedback was rather good and we already know ways on how to conduct the test in a better fashion specially as the specific wording for each element goes...

So take the test have fun with it, ask your friends and family to take it, there is no wrong answer, so enjoy. I will try to publish some results in the end, (will not be as simple but I will try at least to give a small report, on specific issues such as localization.

I have another question?

2009-06-25T16:18:00.000-07:00

This is supposed to be format CD/DVD etc... I know its not perfect but I'm a bit short on magical ideas for format, (or erase that also exists) and I have to do it before the week end so that the usability study can be launched still in good time, the study will test several different ideas for this icons...

This is format cd :) (I know I know its not obvious).

I have also made a new burn cd icon to put in the same test.

We had an icon for this action But i think this one is better, any way something to test also.

I have a question!

2009-06-24T17:57:00.000-07:00

Hopefully in the next few days I should have a Usability test that I have been working on with Björn Balazs from apliki.de on the K3B icons in that study I will pose the same question I'm about to pose now.
And hopefully a few more options, that will come from the feedback of this post.
So the question is......
"Data cd" 1 or 2?....

1
2

Don't think to hard, just fire the first thing that pops in your mind, that is the best way to judge a icon IMO..also if you have an better idea please share...I will try to include it in the usability test.

P.S Ofcourse the numbers will have to be redone for each size and the document as well... Its one source file for each icon. meaning this one = 14 files 7 png's and 7 svgz's.

The air we see...

2009-06-19T20:24:00.000-07:00

Today the great Marco Committed air into svn.

Let me just tell you a bit about air, air is a direct descendant of the air wallpaper, I made the first sketch of it the same day I made the wallpaper, and it tries to make the people that found the Oxygen theme "to black" happy. There is no one fits all design, and hopefully with air we can make a wider spectrum of people love KDE. ( in the future I think we can still make a couple more themes)
Its still we hope coherent, there are a lot of small details that are shared with oxygen both qt theme as plasma theme. That gives it a feeling of belonging as part of the same experience.
We introduced a brand new element in plasma theming, a cropped background the is placed on the plasmoid canvas, (you will see this in the future taken to new heights as it opens a fantasist new set of opportunities to designers).
Its transparent, people love transparent stuff :) (we did some effort to avoid contrast issues, but with certain wallpapers there could be a bit of a problem, nothing much dough...(you still have oxygen theme that is very contrasted)).

We try in KDE 4.3 introduced a new way of branding KDE, were more than the KDE brand we try to share an experience, "the KDE experience" , that you can enjoy in your distribution... And work as already began with some major distributions were we are working together to create that experience for you, and maintaining mostly intact the branding of your distribution.... Its working pretty well so far...

Sharing a brand.

2009-06-15T18:35:00.000-07:00

After reading many of the comments, on Aseigo blog I reached to the conclusion that most people did not get the idea.
We don't want to kill each of the distributions own branding, we want to share, I would not slap a KDE logo on top of your distribution logo, nothing like that.
What we are after is creating something that is recognizable across the room something people can see as recognizable, a "hey that is pretty and I have seen it some ware else". I would do my best to keep a strong visual connection to the specific distro brand but in a way that one brand doesn't kill the other.
I see distros having no problem on using the icon theme, that is a huge part of the branding part, distros do in that remark little to no modifications to it, same goes to oxygen widget theme, usually the major modifications are done on the "easy part" the wallpaper, splashscren and kdm.
So if a distro can share a huge portion of the branding value with KDE, how come we can't do the same for the easy stuff as well???

Don't think this is a totally innocent move from us, more than the making the co-branding of distros I am interested I'm making bridges between the downstream artists and us, so in the future we will be all working together improving and creating a myriad of desktops and brands that people can perceive as one and many, as unique but also versatile, as one experience that comes in many flavors.

This can only be achieve if we all talk and have methods of sharing problems, and propose solutions. There is allot to gain and nothing to lose out of this experiment.

3 more

2009-06-13T16:46:00.000-07:00

As promised 3 more winners.

Simone Lazzaris sent this one, still unnamed.

Midnight_in_Karelia, great pic from Anastasiya S. Litvinenko.

Rings of Saturn by Zoltan Vass.

Announcing the first 3 winners

2009-06-12T17:51:00.000-07:00

As usual the title says it all....

In no particular order ....
Aghi by Matteo Nobile.

Altra, by the games art master It-s, Eugene Trounev (you rock)

And Finally "Evening" by Christoph Kummer

Tomorrow we will announce the 3 remaining ones . stay tunned they should be in svn in no time.

Hope you all enjoy them as much as I do.

Building a brand.

2009-06-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

The last weeks we have been thinking and thinking on what should be the default wallpaper for the upcoming kde 4.3. This is always a very complicated decision because is one of the most prominent branding elements on kde specially now that we do all of the marketing artwork revolving around that single wallpaper..
IN the mid of the discussion i had the idea that we could try to make branded version of our default wallpapers for the distros totally free of charge, It-s agreed with me that we could do that....I thought This could be just the beguiling of greater cooperation on shared branding between kde and the distros... Thre are loads of subjects as branding and artwork goes were we could cooperate in way it would benefit kde and the distros as well... I shared my basic idea with promo people and the rest of the artists in oxygen... and Aaron evolved the concept pretty nicely...

So we officially announce the kde branding service, supposed to be a platform for your distro branding needs and what kde can do in that regard, we will start with something simple as wallpapers, (maximum impact minimum effort) and try to evolve from there.

Any way Aaron http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/06/building-brand-together.html said it much better...

The truth hurts.

2009-05-29T17:48:00.000-07:00

Thats what I have discovered the last days over what wallpaper should we remove from KDE to make room for the new ones.

Nobody loves my vector sunset. Snif snif, don't get it it has no bubbles nor is it black it as a bit but ist not to much, and now its going away, and im going to cry :).... OO cruel cruel world.
And now I have to say goodbye to my all time favorite best wallpaper.

Vector sunset, we had some fun times didnt we ? :)

P.S. never fear all of the ones we remove will be just moved to KDE artwork ;)

we wont let you die my precious. nhaahahhahaha, my prechioussss :)

wallpapers that are wosome...

2009-05-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

This is just a small post to show a small preview of the extremely narrow down wallpaper short list.

The kde people sent me some of the best stuff I have ever seen, and I had a really hard time narrow them down to this 12.... that im only showing in small sizes so the original creators can still do what ever they want with them after we chose the 5 that will go it to replace 5 old ones, (yes 5, 2 would be soooo unfair to everybody that submitted his wonderful pictures .)

And this means we have now 5 wallpapers that are going to say goodbye to the default set.... And in your opinion witch 5 should those be??? This means witch 5 wallpapers should in your opinion be removed from the default 15 we ship today in 4.2???

They are in total random order....

P.S. Many many thanks to everyone that submitted wallpapers the little competition was of extreme quality, and I'm very sorry to the ones that did not made it to the final 12. This does not say anything about the quality of your work.

O and BTW..........;)

The anatomy of a airy clock.

2009-05-22T05:13:00.000-07:00

Wile doing the composition of the clock i shown yesterday and some fixing to the handles so they are more different i realized it might be interesting to share a bit of all the wells and turns it has.

So we start out with making a base a canvas that has some effects and a contrast drop shadow, the dorpshadow has to be then exported into png in a big size and then re imported and rescaled... then we made a copy of the shadow bit.... nex t we create a fully opaque bg because we cant create a cliping area in plasma and I dont want to see the plasmoid andles under all of the clock.
Next we create the pointers and the shadows for each one, we need to do the same as we did for the dropshadow in the clock shadows.... the pointers need to be 100% opaque so we get good contrast betwin the shadow and the pointers, we cant clip the shadows couse they have a difrent rotation point.... next we make a copye of the details of the clok to overlay on top of the pointers so we get a transparency look.... layuer everthing and here you have a plasma clock :) simple right?

A clock in mid Air!!

2009-05-21T13:43:00.000-07:00

So the last few days I haven't been able to do any real icon work because i have been busy with real life work , and prepping the artwork for the 4.3 release. That mens playing with plasma stuff and helping Marco Martin do his magic... So we reworked the plasma air theme so its more air theme and less oxygen... they go anlong very nicly together but they should not use the same elements :).

Marco is working on the really not so fun part of the task bar and panel, were me I got the clock part :) aka "the easy one" :).

Here you have a mock svg (final thing should be almost exactly the same ). a close up of the clock "in mid air" :)

Oxygen is back to work.

2009-05-19T18:57:00.000-07:00

Oxygen widget style needs work we know that, but time is scarce and the oxygen qt widget developers are incredibly busy in other parts of kde to so... but we did managed to bring some nice new features to 4.3 and kill some nasty bugs, like bug 163990 and bug 166082... so here you have new and improved tabs.

Think its a major improvement. from the old ones. kudos to Huynh Huu Long for his usual brilliant work.

There is still much work to be done, and like in all other areas of oxygen help is appreciated ;).

Working on some last icons

2009-05-18T18:08:00.000-07:00

Today was a really busy busy day with lot's of work, but at least I managed to pay all of my most pressing bills and I feel much better with that taken care of.
But on the not so good side that left me with not so much time to work on the several icon sets I have pending. Means that I did not managed to finish K3B, or Mameexecuter, just found the time to do some more size versions and a new hidef device icon.
Some side notes....
The blue ray logo (bb-logo) people answerer my email with an ok to use the logo if I have blue-ray player...
But to be on the safe side I will make unbranded versions of this icons and upload it as well so people can chose which one to use....
Im completly impressed by the quality of the wallpaers submited im my litle quest and I am actualy considreing doing somthing I usualy dont do that is changing the rules in the midle of the game that is choose more than 2 wallpapers, yes they are that good!!!

4.3 Is arround the corner! I need you!

2009-05-16T15:45:00.000-07:00

Do you take great pictures? Does every one says that you rock as a photographer? Do you love KDE?

If your answer was yes to this 3 questions you should be sending me 1 just 1 of what you believe is your best wallpaper photo, so that we can include it as one of the new wallpapers included in Kde 4.3.

I will be selecting 2 of them to replace some of the old ones we have from 4.2.
In this release I wont include nothing from me only remove some of my old ones. (there is to much nuno in kde as is)

Only 1920x1200 or bigger wallpapers will be accepted.
Only wallpapers containing the full name of the photographer and a reference stating the license (lgpl v3 is beter) will be reviewed.
I wont release the ones that don't make the cut! (the original creators keep them and can reevaluate the license as they see fit.)
The criteria for selection is purely mine, I will ask for opinions from the oxygen crew and the kde marketing people.
Dead line one week from now :)
I will show the winners here 3-4 days after the dead line.
Finaly no vector nor abstract work, we have a pretty good set of those already...

last thing
my mail nuno at oxygen - icons dot org, and best of luck!

P.S. I will not replay to the emails its hundreds of them and just sorting it out will be a pain :)

Vintage icon for all your vintage games!

2009-05-14T12:46:00.000-07:00

The team in MameExecutor needed an icon for their upcoming V1.0 release, that is coming out this weekend, they have asked-me to do it some time ago, but I went for the arcade machine icon and that didn't worked very well, because the shape is not the best one for that. So I ended up revolving my faded memories of my younger years wen I played those old games, and had so much more fun will doing so.
Here we go, something that might bring you fond memories of the past, just like MameExecutor does.

P.S. Small icons still missing, I need to redo it for small sizes.
The joystick still needs a bit of love 2. But not today, already spent 6 hours on this :). And K3B needs more icons.

Small update.

2009-05-13T14:47:00.000-07:00

This is almost a identi.ca "dent" just to show the progress on the optical-media-video.

I hope I have all of the k3b icon set done by the end of this week.

On the fonts front i had a lot of positive feed back on this issue but its not easy convincing every one so please if you have a little bit of time try my proposed settings... and share your opinions. One major advice i want to give distros is to make sure sub pixel RGB aa is off. IMO its very discuss-able if it does produces better results and you are not sure your user is using a RGB vertical TFT.

kgpg icon, and fonts.

2009-05-12T14:59:00.000-07:00

Ok first thing the icon. The kgpg people wanted me to do something they could print in large size so I updated the application icon a bit and you just need to use the svgz in svn to get is as big as you might want to.

During the period I was in berlin I noticed most people never chage their font set up, and during the same period I went to every single computer there to change the defoult setings as fonts goes, and most peple like them, and asked if i could blog about it..... so here we go....

nuno's simple rule book for sharper fonts......

#1 set your hinting style to full. even if you like big fonts the result is much sharper if your hinting is set to full.
#2 Use a smaller font size like 8 or 9. specially if you use low or average hinting the small fonts have a much thiner trace that makes the font thickness be exactly 1 pixel. If your fonts thickness is not 1 then you are in trouble. Low hinting style and large fonts make traces of about 1.3 1.5 thikness that result in blury looking fonts, they are not only bad looking they tend to produce headhackes as your eys try to contstantly focus the font.
#3 don't use bold, bold fonts are not as readable as normal fonts because the with of the trace is usually larger than1 and smaller than 2 producing blurry results
#4 use liberation sans (ok this one is the most discussible one in my book) other sans fonts works as well..
#5 Try to make your fonts more greish than blackish IMO much beter sharpness rusults.

This is my set of rules for fonts in Linux its based on my icon pixel perfection experience, works pretty well for me not sure it will for you, depends a lot on your screen but you should try it for a day or 2 and then if you don't like it better you can say "nuno is just dumb". (ok you can say that now, but if you try you will say it with reinvigorated meaning ;) ).

Back to fire.

2009-05-11T11:29:00.000-07:00

Fire in the sense of burning, aka K3B "Burn Baby Burn".I did not have a hamburger, but I'm slowly getting the designer mojo back.
also took the opportunity to make some hidef icons for some devices. like for example example....
and the old time favorite floppy disk, just for fun, really, I know no one uses them any more :).

A block of black!

2009-05-10T13:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday and today I have been fighting with a film strip for the K3B icons and I have totally blocked, usually my answer is a bad movie and some junk food. And that usually works, or..... heee... not, either way I still get to eat a burger :).
But today I decided to try a different angle, do something black, as you all know I have a thing for black and bubbles.... so here it goes a blackish bluish thing that you can use as an wallpaper, or nothing :).

In case you are wondering if my icon block is gone .... Nope.... But I did not had a burger :) thats a good thing right?.... hummmm Right?..... I wonder :P.

More frisbees.

2009-05-08T05:09:00.000-07:00

Yeah that's what become sooner or later, well some I still have some very old disk's around for media that i care a lot, and I should really make backup copy's of them before time plays a trick on them. Attention you should place them for recycling in the end. ;)

The DVD one now (64x64, and 22x22 need a bit of work..)..... I made some improvements to the other ones btw. The poll running on the side, seems to be getting interesting , with a tight fight between "finishing the icon set" and "working on the widget theme".

P.S. update. after making this post I realized that the DVD logo could use some pixel tweaking in the 64x64 128x128 and 256x256... and here is the result.

As usual you can check the svgz sources for each of them in kde svn, in kdesuport.
Btw if you are wondering were you might find them... type this in your console 'svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/kdesupport/oxygen-icons' of course after installing subversion and going in the console to the place were you wants them to be.

K3B, It will rock your optical media.

2009-05-07T12:50:00.000-07:00

So as I said, I'm working on K3B icons set, wen all of the icons are done we plan to do a usability study over them so I can test one doubt I have about action icons and context...

Any way here goes some of today's work on the media icons.

The other mime, and a new poll

2009-05-06T15:03:00.000-07:00

So first thing is to show the mime missing from yesterdays application. It represents individual elements that can be used in projects... Like for example a lamp :)
So for the last month I had a poll ruing in the side links so it could diverge some attention to everything going on there. The results were fantastic and most people seemed to like the work so far in kde...

So today I launch a new poll asking what in your opinion should be oxygen main focus for the 4.3-4.4 time frame.....

PS I know the poll visually sucks and the integration its a google thing, if some one knows of a good themable poll to add please let me know.

The mime type for the eletrical app.

2009-05-05T17:03:00.000-07:00

Very fast post just to show the work on the QElectroTech-project mime-type...

Also committed the small icons for the application itself.

Back to Oxygen!

2009-05-04T13:50:00.000-07:00

Berlin was a lot of fun, must say that I'm deeply impressed by the Amarok people, a wonderful passionate, creative, and interesting group.
I had the chance to share some of my views of, were we can do better visually wise, it went far better than what I had expected, and I have learned a lot in the process. (thats what you get wen working with bright people)

Want to give a huge thanks to KDAB, The KDE e.v., and the Amarok team ror making it possible.
So tomorrow it's back to work and the beguiling of the K3B action icons marathon, hopefully not as complex as kmix was....

Amarok rocks!

QElectroTech, another day another app.

2009-04-29T02:21:00.000-07:00

The people over at the http://qelectrotech.org/ project asked me if I could do an icon/logo for them and, my first try was rather miserable because I tried the logo approach with all the logo making rules, a check back to reality made me realize that i should do an application icon.

In the future the application will have checking features, and at that point I think we should remove the precision pen by a Multimeter.

Tomorrow I will be traveling to Berlin for the Amarok developer sprint, our favorite music player crew were so kind to invite me and help me with all the little problems, Amarok Rocks.
But this means that the usual post of the day thing might sufer a bit. So if I don't blog everyday in the next days it just means I'm working hard with all the amarokers in Berlin.

2 wallpapers for fun!

2009-04-28T07:24:00.001-07:00

So after working for the past days only on icons today I decided to post 2 wallpapers cause there is more to oxygen than icons, much more....
So here they go....
The first one is a wallpaper I worked wen trying to come up with ideas for the media desktop activity in plasma. Works pretty well for media content. 1600x1200

The second one is a colored version of air in more pastel/green tones I can make it in pretty much any color you might want so.... yeah just need to ask.

Hope you guys like it.

P.S. the feedback from last blog post about the ecosystem gave me a lot of ideas that I will probably make a poll for the best ones just after the current poll is dead. so 2 days for cliking those links in the side.

DIGG

The last of the Kmix.

2009-04-27T02:59:00.000-07:00

FINALLY committed the stuff to SVN under /22x22/actions/ and also the source svgz's. The entire set is named kmix-***** maybe the naming need to be reworked into mixing-****. any way the kmix developer can now point to the new icons.

Lately I have been thinking on selling stuff KDE/theming oriented, like for example themed folders icons in star trek style, plasma themes that are in a Dune like atmosfere etc... Do you think its a good idea and if so would you like to read about it on my blog post's.

Almost done mixing!

2009-04-24T20:07:00.000-07:00

Ok I must admit I'm getting tired of this icons :D, but I tried to make them better than last iteration and less confusing... the first one is the "pc-speaker", I have no better idea than this, and honestly I think its pretty good :P, secondly I made the "mic boost" using a red emblem with an arrow up, and finaly made the "record" channel's like a record button with a printed mic emblem....

Hope you guys like it!

Mixing them all up!

2009-04-24T04:51:00.000-07:00

Some one asked me to show all of the kmix icons together, and if some one asks I obey :), any way I think it only makes sense, so here its goes the almost complete icon theme from KMix in oxygen style. Currently I think its only missing, default PCM, pc speaker, and surround center.

So in order we have, master, front, surround, LFE, PCM, front mic, front mic boost, line, cd, mic, mic boost, headphone, digital line, record master, and finaly record secundary.

Digital and anlagog imput.

2009-04-23T05:29:00.000-07:00

2 More channels, the analog one is based on the one we have now in devices just made it gold, the digital one will work better on a non white background because it has a light sparkle.

Geting back to KMix.

2009-04-22T19:48:00.000-07:00

Made a new version of the LFE icon to better say sub-wolfer, an icon for the PCM channel (digitally converted analog wave) and the CD channel .

Burning the small icons

2009-04-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

Today's post is a very quick one to show yesterdays icon in the small sizes..

Hope you like it, 22x22 still needs a bit of tweaking and maybe oxygen master David Miller will pull some of his usual magic. but for now I'm going to get back to KMix and the rest of k3b icons and theming... I will keep you posted.

Burn baby burn!

2009-04-21T15:03:00.000-07:00

Ok so this is just a WIP. Not sure I can consider it done, but because I have been trying to make a post every day in order to get some more hits in this blog thing, here it goes...

Yes its our K3B app icon a new one for the new K3B coming soon.

DIGG

Oxygen on House M.D.

2009-04-18T10:20:00.000-07:00

Today I recived a screen shot of the last episode of the House M.D. TV show (episode 21).
I'm a big fan of the show,can't wait it goes live here on cable, they were using oxygen icons, it realy made my day :). Have a look

More icons for KMix channels.

2009-04-17T04:17:00.000-07:00

We had the device microphone already done so all I had to do was some minor adaptations.

Mic,

Mic front

and LFE “Low Frequency Effect”, which is a special audio track which is usually sent straight to the sub-woofer.

kmix icons development.

2009-04-16T04:48:00.001-07:00

Small post just to show developments on kmix icons.

The one from yesterdays post. mixed a bit of 3 and 4.

Front channel

Master capture channel.

Secondary capture channel.

Surround.

So basically this is the work done so far on the blasted icons, can't say I'm overly happy with them specially the surround icons that is by nature very 3d like but in a 2d icon does not work very well.

Small icons, big decisions!

2009-04-15T15:02:00.000-07:00

Well not that big of a decision, but I have started today to work on the small icons for kmix (bit tired of the timevault pixel pushing). I ah been putting this ones off my to do list cause they are way more difficult than what they seam to be. 22x22 icons are a pain to make even more than 16x16.....

So I have a design I'm mostly happy with for the master Chanel but I cant make up my mind on what works best of a series of versions made, so what do you think 1 2 3 or 4.... how does it look in your screen?

My personal preference goes for 2 but... Not sure.... so I thought what a good opportunity to listen "read" our users.

KDE on them!

2009-04-14T03:07:00.000-07:00

Oxygen Rocks! (Judging by the poll I have down there), but most of all cause of the people we have on board.
Some months ago the people from the KDE on windows project asked-me for a logo, and I tried several versions and in all of them I failed miserably.
But cause Oxygen is not, a "one men show", Martin Zilz aka Mofux tried to do is thing and... Boy! does he rocks! Enjoy the great stuf he does......

One more version.

2009-04-13T13:33:00.000-07:00

After reading all of the coments and testing several of the ideas in them, I ended up going for the "Delorean" time gauge.... with a twist....

Post of the day, More on the timevault icon.

2009-04-13T06:22:00.000-07:00

Im still working on the time voult icon I posted 2 days ago but im not realy all that happy with the time aspect of it...

What do you think?

Korgac icon, new version.

2009-04-12T06:47:00.000-07:00

The last version of the Korgac icon was not making most people happy for it had a Warning feeling to it, the "!" was not working dough it seamed like a good idea wen I was making it. The bell was the way to go, but I had some bad experiences making realistic bells in the past.
So the idea popped out in my head to make the bell in a more figurative way using the usual information signs we use in Oxygen icon set...

Btw I hope all of you have a very happy Easter, with lots and lots of chocolate

Korgac icon, and TimeVault.

2009-04-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

Few days ago i made a new icon for Korgac .

I probably need to replace the ! by a bell or something....

Right now I'm working on a icon for an exiting application coming to KDE land soon, timevault.

It still needs some work on the time aspect of it, but i think its coming out nicely.

Kig is a program for exploring geometric constructions.

2009-04-10T16:39:00.000-07:00

Some times I decide to kill one of the numerous elements we have in techbase missing icons list, today I finished Kig.
Hope you guys like it.

O and BTW I might be going to the desktop summit in Gran Canaria so here it goes ...

Koffice icons 2, the HighDef ones.

2009-03-07T06:39:00.000-08:00

Today we committed the 16x16 icon versions of the koffice application icon set for oxygen.
we are just missing the 22x22 ones. 256x256 128x128 64x64 48x48 32x32 and 16x16 done.
The big news here is that KOffice 2.0 Beta was 7 Released .

Koffice icons.

2009-02-20T10:02:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post to show what I have been up to lately, chart icons for koffice.

P.S. Sorry for the removal of the comments. Its my fault.

Air and KDE 4.3.

2009-02-14T14:16:00.000-08:00

Air was the wallpaper we introduced in KDE 4.2, but that is just the beginning of something larger. Air is supposed to be different than what Oxygen is, something that tries to appeal to a user base looking for a more "sexy" experience than Oxygen (yeah I know you are out there :) ), but to still have the capability of merging nicely with what we have now.

The first thing we started working on was a Plasma theme. Plasma, with it's immense plasticity and a fantastic coder team, allows us to try to push for new ideas.

Another extremely cool thing about Plasma is it's ability to become anything you want it to be. So a user in KDE 4.3 might have a desktop that looks like this, if that is his wish, without having to use external software:

(click for fullscreen mode)

This is an example of how simple one can make a desktop in the 4.3 Plasma once we all manage to get all of our plans working. The new systray speck will help, the work being done on the task bar will allow you for different ways to sort your running/ruanbe apps, etc etc...

KDE will very shortly become the desktop you need and not the desktop we think you need.

And I find that very very exciting.

DIGG

High defenition Oxygen, TokamakII, and paying the rent.

2009-02-12T16:07:00.000-08:00

Hey! Yes Oxygen now has a high definition folder 256x256, David Betio, created most of them out of the source svgz files during the Tokamak I had the pleasure to help make possible during this weekend. Major Kudos to DEI-ISEP for all the support excellent.

I also think we finished the Quassel icon set including some nice state animations for the system tray icons.
Next on to do some icons for Koffice... btw I have benn trying to post the icons I do in http://identi.ca/pinheirokde.

In a different front, I have been giving some thought on a method to pay my house rent, open source work is a lot of fun but it really does not pay the rent.

One of the ideas I had to help support oxygen development would be something like selling LGPL Oxygen adons like icons, wallpapers, avatars, even plasmoids, for free or whatever the user think they are worth... What do you guys and girls think? bad idea? good? do you have some other beter idea? please share.

It is out! The answer....

2009-01-27T10:55:00.000-08:00

Kde 4.2 aka "the answer" is out.
I'm extremely proud of being a part of the wonderful community that created this amazing desktop.

Be happy enjoy 4.2

Quassel because we all love IRC

2009-01-23T10:40:00.000-08:00

I was cheking and it as passed quite some time since I posted a blog entry about Icons, but icons are still a major part of what oxygen is... So here it goes an entry about icons: Quassel Icons.

This are the ones we did so far, and they are a bit more joyfull than the typical oxygen icon but ,I think that IRC and IM applications are more Social and fun applications, so we tried to do them a bit more up and fun... BTW Quassel people rocks.

While doing this we needed to do some IM like users and that started a new type of user for this kind of apps. Think it looks pretty.

Yeah I know the light one that is suposed to stand for invisible is not working very well... I will work more on it...

PS The problem with the transparent Icon is already solved, thanks to Jpsetso ;) http://tinyurl.com/bchodb