After a week of pondering and discussing we’ve finally chosen which will be the default wallpaper!

And the winner is…

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Hello.

With the announcement of the Oxygen Wallpaper Contest in August, we, the Oxygen Team, intended to have the KDE community give the brand new KDE 4 desktop its face - and the response was overwhelming! Artists and KDE enthusiasts submitted around 2000 high quality pictures, most of them being fantastic wallpapers.

The jury, composed of David Vignoni, Nuno Pinheiro, Kenneth Wimer and myself, had a hard time digging through that stack of contributions due to the sheer size and finally pick the ones which will to be shipped as KDE 4.0 wallpapers.

And so, after this long and tedious time of waiting for all of you we’re finally announcing the big winners of this fantastic contest! =)

NOTICE:
Some people in the comments had some worries, and thought it may look suspicious seeing that some of the winning wallpapers are infact being done by some members of the jury. To them I want to answer the following things, which I’ve already answered in a comment replying to Tina:
We voted in a way so that we didn’t know who was the author of a certain wallpaper, the votes were secret, and we couldn’t vote for our wallpaper (the vote was the medium value of the other votes). The credit file was not associated at all with wallpapers.
So nothing to worry about, we’ve studied a voting system, we voted, and we took up the results *always* trying to make them in the most impartial way possible.
That’s exactly because we knew some of our wallpapers were in the competition. =)

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Mesdames and Messieurs, time has come to finally unveil the winners of the contest! This is one, the first unveiled, of the winning wallpapers! We reached a number of 15 total winners!

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Hello.

A lot of time passed since my last blog post. And a lot of time has passed with me continously telling to myself to really take a moment or two from the busy workflow of life, and get the time to write on the blog again… the thing is that the period lasts since a lot of time, pretty much since when I misteriously disappeared.

At the time, from the moment when I re-appeared on IRC, every day I said to myself that I really had to write what happened in those two “misterious” weeks (was it two weeks?) to me, why I disappeared so misteriously and what the heck did I do. I wanted to do a full explanation, writing a good post. This was also to explain to the many people who worried during that period (sorry Eugene!) and for who, when I came back, asked me what happened during that time. Exactly the same guys which I’ve answered with these words: «Sorry, can’t explain now, but I’ll write a post on the blog in the next days explaining in detail what happened!».

So, after this episode I realized that I am a liar.

Because, at the end of each week, the weekend comed, and I each time Sunday night arrived without me having done anything, lacking time for various reason.

Yeah, school began again, and this one (3rd year of high school) is one of the most difficult years, for what concerns the high schools.

In the meantime I lost almost all the interest I had in doing that, and forgot many details. I will write a couple of lines if you really want to know, or I will explain directly to you on IRC or Jabber. Nothing so terrifically interesting though, trust me.

However, altough I’ve not updated the blog, this doesn’t mean I’ve been dormient. The good thing infact is that I did a lot of work for KDE, some of which very exciting, while some other not, but still a lot of things.

So, I will start with a blogging marathone, and I’ll try to keep up with a one-post-per-day rythm. I’ll start with a big fish, but won’t reveal anything for now. Check the post which is coming out in a couple of minutes…

Gah, I wanted to write a really short post but as always I end up writing too much…. :\

I leave you with this candy for today, screenshot directly from my desktop:
-Click to show image-

P.S. I want to let you know that I’m going to put some Google Adwords on this blog. However, I won’t keep all the revenues for personal incomings, or this kind of stuff, but I will split the earnings in two parts. I will give 50% of what I earn to Paleo, the guy who is hosting this site (as well as many others, like amarok.kde.org) just for his passion and his admiration versus KDE. He does not receive any financial help, and he provide an extremely valuable service. He is also always online to provide help or any other things we, the hosted, need.

And for that service which he provides for free to the whole comunity, I think he deserves all my respect, and that’s just a way to tell him “thanks a lot dude!”. I will keep the restant 50% for helping myself partecipating in KDE events, covering travel expenses, and all this kind of stuff. You know, I’m just a 16-years-old student, and I’ve got kind of a limited budget… I’ve payed all by myself the past two Akademies, and I’m running a bit out of money. I will try to be as transparent as possible on that, and publicly tell when I will use that money.

This is just for clarification if some people might get this wrong, maybe thinking that I’m trying to monetize their effort, or monetizing KDE. =)

P.P.S. Between the new coming things include an update in the skin of the blog, cursors, and other stuff!

P.P.P.S. Hope this post doesn’t contain too many errors, I’ve not even reread it!

You probably thought I’ve been dormient in this period, and you’re wrong.
While I’m *hard* working on the krunner refactoring (and I hope to blog on it soon, and no, I won’t give any preview in the meantime) tonight I haven’t been feeling like code, and I did those KDE 4 buttons for you.
Don’t feel offended if your favourite k4 technology isn’t there, I just did the first who came in my mind….. hope you will still like them.
Feel free to reuse them as you like: they’re not licensed under the usual cc by-sa 3.0 license, so just pick your favorite one and use it in forums, blogs, homepages….
If you redistribute them an attribution+incoming link is welcome, in case you just use them for signatures or for the website “emblems” collection, and this kind of stuff, I autorize you to just use it, don’t care too much. =)
Here they are, have fun!

Damn, it’s very late, I think I should go to sleep now…. see you all

(Update: tiredness is not an excuse for not closing HTML tags)

This time it’s up to you show how good you are!

We’re making a contest to completely renew the set of default wallpapers shipping with KDE 4.
Rules are very simple, submissions are accepted until 00:00 (CET) of the 20th August 2007, resolution should be big enough to fit well into bigger screens and images must be released under a free license (that we will decide with you later).
Remember that we welcome ANY type of art, vectors, photos, pixel art, 3D stuff, pizzas…. and you’re free to choose whatever color or style or message you prefer, the requirement is just that the final work looks good (especially remember that it will be used as a wallpaper).
Basically everything else you need to know is already written on the contest website (done by me), which you can find at http://pd.ruphy.org.

NOTE:
For those who do or do not partecipate in the contest, please spread this link [http://pd.ruphy.org] and this announcement as much as you can! News sites, your blog, everything is good, with your help, we will make the best set of wallpapers ever, and we’ll ship it with KDE 4!

Get pretty pictures, spread the link, have fun, and viva Oxygen!

After the so much loved analog clock and the relative screencast I did some time ago to present to the world the first plasmoid ever, it’s time for a little replica.
The new clock I made is more modern and fresh, and it’s digital. It’s made to look like the big informations that you can find in the train stations, the ones who flip down to change what is written on them.

Working both in Plasma and in Oxgen is really worthwhile to create these nice stuff.
So, here it borns this clock. And this is just the beginning, because both me and Nuno have a continuous flow of ideas of new features and cool effects we can implement into it, at the point that Nuno yesterday said that “this is going to be the best plasmoid ever”. And I really hope so.
For the pretty pictures, viva Nuno!
I made a little screencast, so you can see how nicely it animates. Unfortunately it has been a bit fucked up with the colors, so here’s a screenshot to see how it really looks:

IMPORTANT NOTE: In the screencast I’m showing hours and seconds, instead of hours and minutes: the seconds are displayed in the screencast just to make you see the animation better.
Seconds will be added, as the code that makes the animation is pretty fast, but we still haven’t deicided where; they can be little and near the minutes, or simply a ‘:’ flashing.

• Download the screencast (OGG Theora, 145 KBytes)
• Download the screencast (AVI, 138 KBytes)

Have fun! =)

So, in really few words, this is the white set, I removed the double arrows because as I already told you I didn’t like them very much, and they’re are already gone.
Nuno and Ken forced me to make the tail thinner, but I’m not totally convinced… I will release for sure a version with ticker tails, for those who liked them. And I must say that git really rocks for that kind of works! =)

They look much more professional indeed. Let me know of what you think. =)

Here he is:

And our new president drying his underwears on the fire at aKademy 2007

Anyway, apart from this joke, Aaron knows I fully estimate him, he is a good friend and we hacked toghether since the beginning of KDE 4.
So good luck dude for this new important role, and continue rocking! =)

…also known as my vision for the default oxygen cursor theme

Hello everyone,
finnally I managed to get blogging again. I would like to show you some cursors I did in the last few days. I’m sorry if the image below doesn’t look very good, some cursors even look blurred, but that’s not my fault. I spent an entire afternoon in figuring out how to do that composition without having an enormous loss of quality with many programs (inkscape was behaving incredibly badly), so I won’t redo them just because some of them look a bit blurred. Please understand me.

Anyway, to give you the “proof” that they look great, not like that image, I attach here all the PNGs with the basic arrow in all the different colors: (randomly sorted)

But before showing you the whole thing, some disclaimer:

• Those cursors do look pretty nice, but the set is still far from being complete or perfect, or even something that comes closer to that.
• They do look a bit childish and playful, that’s partly because of the composition made in a “raimbowish” way, but that’s also probably because of the shapes, I’m not satisfied at all by the the double arrows.
• The clock will have another post dedicated, as the idea is completely original, and it still needs to be completed
• There is no whitish theme. I know, and I’m already working to have it.
• There is still an incredibly vast space for improvements, they will be much nicer for the final release.
• I’m sure I forgot something else….

So, here is the thing, in all the colors the Oxygen palette permits, so that it will suit any taste: (again, I’m sorry for the blur some of them have)

Ah, I forgot to say, why I did so many colors?
Simple, every people at aKademy, while I was doing them, told me stuff like: “I would like to see them red.”, “Why don’t you make them green?”, “Hey, yellow is so cool!”, “Please, do them blue!”, “Gray will look awesome…”, etc etc… So, here it comes the solution!
The cursor parade: the right color to anyone!

UPDATE: One of the reason that lead me to make all the different colors and that I forgot to write is usability. Anyone is free to choose the color is better for him/her basing on the color scheme it’s used more on his/her desktop. I made a test with a couple of people that usually loose the usual white cursors of (k)ubuntu on their screen, especially when using programs like oo.o, and I made them try the yellow cursors. They haven’t lost them once until now (more than a week). That’s not because it’s big or something, is just a matter of choosing the right colors, colors that make enough contrast on every background.