It is done!

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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.


Comments

Filip van den Bergh said…
"almost all elements have animations that are obstructive to the user"

I hope you mean something else.
6:39 AM
Filip van den Bergh said…
O, and, congratulations! You've done a great job!
6:39 AM
Pinheiro said…
@Filip van den Bergh

Fixed :)
7:12 AM
Anonymous said…
*_* WOW

you rock guys!
2:07 PM
Anonymous said…
Absolutely awesome, thank you so much!
3:41 PM
Anonymous said…
KDE4 = Worthless bloat (Akondai and supporting junk) and resource-wasting eye candy ... just call me a former KDE user for now.
5:40 PM
Pinheiro said…
@Anonymous in the case of Oxygen I don't consider the animations "resource-wasting eye candy", first they really area low on CPU usage, they do provide IMO a more polished and natural experience were people get notification and feedback from the UI in an unobstructive way.

Hope I'm not feeding a troll
6:33 PM
Anonymous said…
Oxygen icons are fine as such. But I have one plead: pleeeeease please please clean the icon files up. On Gentoo, it's a package of nearly 130 MB! Many icons are more than 1 MB in size, some of which only show a simple two-colour arrow. I am on a slow connection and sigh every time a new KDE release is out. There’s the potention of steaming it down to two thirds, if not half. Cheers dudes.
7:39 PM
Eshmee said…
I agree that Oxygen has seen much improvement with the new version. The one thing that bothers me though is some KDE apps that are heavy on views (like kmail or akregator within kontact) doesn't look very good because there are too much level changes between views. See yourself:

http://imgur.com/bqb3W.png

I'm not saying it's ugly it just doesn't contribute to the coolness factor and does add a good amount of clutter (as in the above screenshot) in some apps.
1:13 AM
Pinheiro said…
@Anonymous just ask Gento packagers to not ship the source svg'z files that would save you 90% of the space. You don't need them any way
1:54 AM
Anonymous said…
Thanks for the answer. I filed a bug in Gentoo's tracker yesterday and they said I'd have to go upstream with that. I'm not sure now whether they meant Oxygen or KDE upstream. And I thought though that KDE would use SVG everywhere now, so only the PNGs are relevant then?
9:22 AM
Pinheiro said…
@Anonymous yep
as you noted some svg's are over 1mb they are extremely complex vectors, and rendering them takes some time, png is faster
10:48 AM
Anonymous said…
Mr Pinheiro. You have done wonders for KDE. SC4.4 is the first open source desktop release of any brand, be it KDE, Gnome, E17 or whatever that I would want to recommend to my circle of graphics designers.

/an ex design agency CEO
1:21 AM
Unknown said…
Great work Nuno! Thank you for that ;-)
7:32 AM
Anonymous said…
Great work Pinheiro,

Please don't listen to the trolls, you are the best designer KDE ever had.

Thanks for this awesome KDE release.

A happy KDE user.
11:05 AM
Anonymous said…
The little box in the right/bottom corner in the Ethais background looks like the VMWare logo
9:06 PM
Anonymous said…
Some of the individual icons look nice, but somehow the icon tray with volume and network applet looks hideous - seem to be not uniform, and don't sit well with each other.
Fixing this could really help the initial look of KDE.
5:04 AM
Pinheiro said…
@Anonymous
yes I fully agree with you on the system tray issues
The issues in the system tray run deep and most of them are cause by the fact that we up until recently could not do anything about it.
Now we can, I hope that a better answer can be provided after the tokamak/oxygen meeting
5:29 AM
Satya said…
great post
11:56 PM
Rowan said…
This looks awesome! Keep up the good work!
9:48 PM
Anonymous said…
another user here who thinks the system tray icons really don't fit - i think it really spoils the overall look of the desktop, enough for me not to want to use it, because it gives an overall non-homogenous feel. you may think that is a bit of a bad reason not to start using KDE again, but i struggle each time when trying to go back because of reasons like this. especially now as the 10.04 ubuntu will have slick gnome icons on the tray which will look really good together.
i hope this can be fixed soon
9:25 AM
Anonymous said…
Is there any way to get an Air theme for Plasma from KDE 4.3?

I am not saying that new Air is bad (though I liked random circles while non-random squares annoy me a bit), I am saying that these are two very different themes. I tried to get an Air theme which can be found in KGetHotStuff, but it seems like it conflicts with system-installed Air

Please make "classic" Air available!
2:25 PM
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