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...

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...

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 ...

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 wallp...

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...

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...