Freeze yesterday, freedom today!
Yes yesterday we manged to commit the rest off the artwork for 4.2 including a new wallpaper "HighTide" by Johan Thelin Little Brother, Patrik E. Thelin. Thanks to David Betio for his work here.
Also managed to update the splash screen and KDM artwork to 4.2, thanks Aaron and Loïc Marteau.
Did a a lot off bug fixing for oxygen icon bugs. Only 5 remaining. :).
Overall I must say I'm quite proud of the work we done in the 4.2.
So now I'm planing on what to do the next 6 months for the 4.3.
We have some application icons to do already like Quassel, or the network plasma icons, we need to continue the Koffice icon set adventure, and the normal never ending polishing of oxygen icons...
We also plan to do some more touch ups to the oxygen widget theme. and start working on subtle animations in it.
Next month many of the Plasma people are coming over here for the exciting Tokamak meeting in Porto, organized by ISEP, great new ideas cooking up there, from my end I plan to show the next plasma theme me and Marco Martin are working on. And provide the usual entropy, plus wine (real one, not the "not one" one) ;) hint Sebas.
What about you what is your wish for KDE 4.3?
P.S. I joined the ranks of micro blog out there and started using identi.ca you can find me and many other KDE people here
Overall I must say I'm quite proud of the work we done in the 4.2.
So now I'm planing on what to do the next 6 months for the 4.3.
We have some application icons to do already like Quassel, or the network plasma icons, we need to continue the Koffice icon set adventure, and the normal never ending polishing of oxygen icons...
We also plan to do some more touch ups to the oxygen widget theme. and start working on subtle animations in it.
Next month many of the Plasma people are coming over here for the exciting Tokamak meeting in Porto, organized by ISEP, great new ideas cooking up there, from my end I plan to show the next plasma theme me and Marco Martin are working on. And provide the usual entropy, plus wine (real one, not the "not one" one) ;) hint Sebas.
What about you what is your wish for KDE 4.3?
P.S. I joined the ranks of micro blog out there and started using identi.ca you can find me and many other KDE people here
Comments
Have a great new year!
Também é muito porreiro saber que a proxima reunião da malta do Plasma é por cá. Boa sorte!
What I think is very important is to visual integration with non-kde software, like Firefox, OpenOffice and gtk
Firefox already have a good Oxygen theme, but OpenOffice is lacking such thing right now
What about bluring out the desktop instead of making it grey. Also blur in the splash screen would be nice an very unique. Also the user smoother gets to know when his computer is ready for use.
so my wish in short: blur!
Google Chrome won me over to suble animation, which it uses beautifully. Not just obvious things like the tabs sliding around, but the gentle hover effects too. The animations are fast, almost imperceptible, but not quite. It makes the whole interface feel more organic and intuitive, kinda like the iphone's.
best regards
Some nice can also be seen in google picasa. Also more animated Icons would be nive. AFAIK the only animated one I see often is the old kopete icon when a message came in. And that one is rather a slideshow than a smooth animation.
A list of good themes for KDE to choose from: the current ones are archaic (Redmond and friends... :) ).
Uh... and a bit more matching with the Plasma theme would be wonderful! When I right click an icon in the system tray and get a light gray menu over a dark bar it feels like an alien entity. Oxygen and Plasma themes should feel like brother and sister!
Anyway, keep up the good work oxygen folks ;)
@Burke so do I but blur is extremly cpu espensive
@Milan I bet you will like the next plasma theme we are making then :)
@Diego Rondini I agrea for 4.3 we wont have time for that dough...
I must say that kopete looks very crappy when it comes to usability and i don't like any of it's icons and even emoticons (for emoticons i would even prefer tango ones as default).
I am looking forward to doing usability reviews over various kde4 and gnome stuff.
Also make blur less "cpu expensive".;)
And maybe it is time to think about changing the default laylout of KDE-Interface I mean having a lower panel with Menu left, next to it the quicklaunch, then taskbar, then systray, then clock. (basically, of course)
I do not know what would be best, but thinking about that would be a first step. Maybe we as a community just have to make some genereal proposes(or you make some mockups;)) and the users test it by just rearranging their plasmoids for a while. Practicetests are so easy.;)
And a simple think I do not understand in 4.2: Why is the panel Background not the same as the folderview background? It's readability is in most cases of wallpapers very high.
cheers
I don't know if it's oxygen "problem" or kwin, but it would be really amazing! :)
Salut!
In my humble opinion Oxygen wastes too much space with borders and things like that.
For example, just look how many songs you can see in one screen with iTunes on Mac (about 30), and then try to do the same with Amarok 2 (about 15?). I know iTunes is not a good example of how a media player should be, but in this aspect it's really good.
Now when logging in, I see it flickering from the lighter KDM version to the darker splash version and back a few times.
Your example is very bad couse amarok in that list is not using qt style its is hown thing...
same goes for most apps, kde need beter UI design I agrea but dont blaim Oxygen for it. Oxygen dosent the application ui we just theme several individual elements of qt style.
If you belive an app as alot of wasted space talk to the aplication developer.
I have been a very good boy this year, and even if I am still a GNOME I have followed KDE's evolutions very closely, being impressed by how fast it went.
One thing that I like most in KDE is its Oxygen theme. Beautiful and professional. It was still a bit "rough" in 4.0, but today it is just gorgeous. And I'm a bit jealous of it to be honest.
However, one thing that bugs me in the current theme is the way the Backward/Forward arrows look like. Have a quick look at this capture : http://nuno-icons.com/images/wall/snapshot3.jpg
See how they aren't of the same blue at all? And how they are round and glossy while everything else is slick and "squared."
So, dear Santa, in 4.3, could I have new Backward/Forward arrows? I swear I will be a good boy for another full year if this happens.
Yours,
Lincoln
Porting over more of the apps would be very good too.
One thing I would really love to see development work done is plasmoids and the ZUI. At the moment, the only useful plasmoids to me are the system monitors and perhaps the clock. The ZUI is still pretty useless. What we need are good usable things in there that everybody needs daily.
While I'm here, the wastepaper bin looks odd to me. It looks like a sketch and the perspective is awry. Let's try a glassy one.
The windows still look a bit grey. Can we lighten them a bit or have the option to do so?
never ask people for what people want, unless you are willing to read through liiiist of wishes :)
I'd like to point out the starting animation, which is in my eyes beautiful but totally pointless. What do the five (?) symbols tell us? "KDE is booting up"! But can't we have any random animation for that? In that case we could choose way cooler animations. Who cares about what in particular gets loaded right now? For potential bug huntin' these 5 syllables then again don't give enough feedback, so away with them, IMHO.
My 0.02 HK-$
Thanks for the coments I agrea with some not all, we will try to have a look at what we can do for 4.3.
looking at beautiful screenshots done by users, I think it would be great if I could download that desktop-setup in some sort of package to apply with one button-click on one of my own desktops (on one of my ZUI ?).
It would be very cool to have totally different desktops on some ZUI. So switching ZUI would be like switching trough different KDE screenshots.
It would be so cool if users could export and upload their desktop-setup as well with a click of a button.
So sharing not only the kde color scheme or wallpaper, but the whole desktop look and feel.
(I see the problems in this dream as wel: different screen-resolutions, package would have to contain references to publicly available icon-sets, wallpapers, plasma-applets, fonts, color-settings etc..)
first of all, thanks. KDE4.2 is so much nicer then KDE3.x...
but i agree with diego that it would be nice of plasma and oxygen themes would be more the same...
Keep us posted on the plans for 4.3
http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/2972/oxyzc5.png
http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/7176/oxy1dc2.png
Regarding plasma, I think it looks ok, too dark for my taste, but it doesn't bother me overall, except for:
-The kickoff menu
-The Plasma panel editor
-The panel tooltip and the dropdown from grouping windows on the taskbar (looks completely out of place)
Cheers for you, and all KDE devs :-)
I'm not sure about the white lines (would like to see what it would look like without), but I also agree with most of what Luis said as well; specifically regarding the topmost line dividing the title bar and the options below it.
Also, I'm not sure if you're involved with these projects, but I think both the Konqueror and Kopete interfaces could use a little work.
NOTE: I haven't used KDE since shortly after 4.1 released. These are mostly just observations I have from then and current screenshots, but I plan on returning ASAP as it looks incredible (and I thought it looked good then). Nice work.
My few cents :)
In addition, Bespin has a hack which allows you to drag the windows from any blank point. I dunno it's a dirty hack (probably is), but I'm sure that it can be implemented.
Cheers.
PS: Augusto Leite, it's very weird to find somebody with the same name as I :-)
More or less like in MacOS X...
Or maybe having a gradient on the top of the app that indicates the area of the app that you should click on, to move the application.
I think it is a good usability point, but maybe someone else with better skills on that matter can clarify that :)
Regarding the white lines on the tabs... I think they are perfect to make the application feel more solid, and I like this a lot more than having a black line (as in gnome or windows)
And last but not least, I realize that the whole desktop feels much more solid, but I agree with Burke, that having more gradients or textures would make it more natural.
Thank you Nuno for the great job done and best regards from Spain :)
My 2¢
Juan Manuel Márquez (aka Poldark)
The tabs look very bad.
Thank you in advance! :)
Something I would like to see is a remix of the icons with blues converted to reds, in fact, I would like to donate some of my free time to doing this.
Something like DreamScene in Vista, but better and with beautiful videos, fast, etc.
But I think, that Amarok need some work on his interface (here is a great idea: http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Amarok2+Look+and+Feel?content=93854 )
best regards
For 4.3 I would like to see a more compact interface; such as a 1 pixel border, less padding on scrollbars and status bars, and smaller tabs. A global menu bar similar to mac osx like we had in kde 3.5 would be just fantastic.
It would be nice to have a native look and feel for java, but I understand that that is probably not your job ;)
With computing devices getting smaller and cheaper at the expense of screen resolution, it would be ideal to have an interface that uses all the space it can get. I understand that negative space is important, and the the current look should definitely be the default, but having a compact oxygen style would serve to really push kde 4 to a wider audience and hardware base.
Normal window shadow-this new blue glow isn't bad, but it doesn't popup the window eough.
Popups-they look bad (corners)
Buttons-Like on your mockups, Nuno. They look awesome, and the current in Oxygen not so cool. They could be Plasmas buttons like. With this cool blue glow effect. It's just beautyful.
Anyway keep up the good work. KDE4 is the coolest environment ever! Thanks ;] Greetings from Poland.
I think 99% of Oxygen is gorgeous, but the folder icons still drive me nuts. Sadly, I'd take Vista icons in a heartbeat here, or these, or these.
Secondly, as nice as Oxygen turned out, I really preferred many of your early mock-ups that presented some really new and unique ideas. You had some really interesting concepts for tabs and scrollbars for instance.
Even if those ideas never make in into Oxygen, would it be possible to see another derivative theme of Oxygen with some of those concepts you were working on?