KDE Pinheiro

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. It...

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 ...

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 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....

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 bett er . 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.

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 :)

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