KDE Pinheiro

KDE is a lot of things, today we give you new versions of the KDE Development Platform, the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, today we give you 4.5.0. There are as usual many small, and big improvements that you can read on www.kde.org . I feel honoured to be a small part of it. Its wonderful to see that, the efforts we engaged few years back are starting to pay off, that Artwork and Branding cooperation with the distros is really shaping up, special kudos to OpenSuse, Kubuntu, Mandriva, and many countless other distros like Caixa Mágica , for sharing the work, cooperating and becoming part of KDE. I would like to send a special thanks to the people at Mandriva, ( neoclust , and mikala rock!) for providing-me and others, with constant builds of the most recent KDE in trunk that I could test and work on, there are many ways we can work together and help each other mutually, this is one of them, thank you :), grab your build now from one of your kde mirrors .

So for the last months we have been working really hard to, port our great PIM software to the mobile world, and I must say it is a challenge, the rules all change and most of what you know does not fit the specificities of the interaction methods, the size and dpi of the screens, or even how something as simple as a gradient does not work as you expect. Had that, to learning new exiting technologies like QML and starting to do working mock-ups with them that developers can interpret much better, and in some cases implement directly. (ok this was only a problem for me, but hey if I can do it any one can :) ) And wen you try do a no compromise, solution for the software, meaning that no major feature is removed, you find your self with a monumental challenge. The good part is that so far we managed to overcome all major problems with what I believe in some cases are really innovative, new interaction paradigms, example the folder selection method we created. Also good is that we now are...

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.