KDE Pinheiro

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 differen...

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 ma ke 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.

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, th...

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.

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.

This is a quick post just t show some of the latest developments in oxygen first , krita icon and krita mimetype Second Kchart withe his mimetype alongside. Finally the midi mimetype in another position.

Last week was wonderful for oxygen, we set a net commit record. And made some of the most exiting work i have seen so far has icon goes. David Miller just joined the Oxygen effort and he is ...... well amazing. The mime type icons are going through a huge amount of work and are rely looking so much better David (the other one ;) ) is making some of his best work ever, there. The Sound theme just got some more fresh super sounds from Nuno Povoa. And I redid the mouse and some more little stuff that i think are ok ;).