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.

Because of the huge work-marathone and the enormous and continuous flow of ideas that is going on here I just find time for a very quick post. Basically I’m posting this photo since I’m actually involved into a new emerging community with lots of energies and lots of ideas, but that had suffered from internal problems more or less one month ago. Fortunately everything has been resolved, and now it’s one of the best and most sane community I know in the world of open source. Let’s hope it will always remain that. Good luck KDE Italia!

Download in:

• Small size (532×356; 286.3 KBytes)
• Medium size (1064×712; 879.6 KBytes)
• Large size (4256×2848; 6.7 MBytes)

Ok, it’s already time for this year akademy.
While I’m about to leave, I had the idea of posting a couple of photos of myself. That’s basically because I already promised to meet with a lot of people, and I met most of them just online; so they don’t know my face and I don’t know theirs… This could obviously result in hard times in recognizing us. ;-)
Another reason is that in the comment sections of my blog many people already got astonished that I’m only 16, and don’t believe, so I’m going to prove that…. :P

So here there are a pair of photos of mine, taken into the garden of my house (click to enlarge):

(No, I’m not photogenic at all ;-) )

See (and recognize) you at akademy, have a nice time! =)

Last night I was watching a movie on the TV, it was called “Road Trip 2000″, and suddenly I saw a really familiar face in the movie… have a look at this image, taken directly from the film: (click to enlarge)

Isn’t that a really well-known face?!? Yeah, you’re right, he’s Aaron J. Seigo!
For those who do not know his face, you can have a comparison with this image…

Yeah, he’s exacly the same guy! And he has a really important part during all the movie.
Finnally I discovered what Aaron did before working on KDE! ;-)
And that’s also the proof that working on KDE is actually funnier than acting on hollywood movies. I mean, at least for some people… :P

Update: As someone reported, it may not seem obivious that this post is actually a joke. I know it’s not really him (although it really looks identical), but the actor instead seems to be a guy called “Tom Green” (never heard about him).

Hello folks! =)
I’m really glad to announce that finally I finished implementing the icons for Plasma.
I initially got inspired by one of the David’s mockups: he was showing it to me to see if I could implement something similar: he knew I was already working on icons for Plasma.
What he showed me was essentially this flash animation that shows the concept live, and this other PDF that actually explains in detail what the animation does. (I really suggest looking at them, they’ll make you do a big ‘WOW’)
I immediately loved his idea, and I told him that I would immediately begin to implement it. This morning, I proudly showed the results of my work to Nuno, and he refined the look of those Plasma icons. And a screenshot is a must.

So, this is basically how it looks right now. The icon in the top-left corner actually represents one of those “quick actions” you can read about in the PDF and look at in both the animation and in the screencast. Because, obviously, I made a screencast! =)

Download the screencast (6.1 Mb)

I would like also to thank Siraj Razick very much for the initial code and efforts he put in the icons.

Take care, and see you in the next post! =)

P.S. Today I’m going to go on holiday for a few days, so if you don’t see your comment approved for some time, you know why. Sorry, I have to keep this “each user must have at least one approved comment” restriction because else the blog would become full of spam (I’m already handling a lot of it). Your comment hasn’t been lost, just.. will take some more time to appear! =)

UPDATE: added an antispam filter. For this reason now all the comments are immediately accepted by default.

Those of you who regolary follow the KDE commits may have already noticed that Thomas finally committed his code. So, the question comes obivious: why haven’t I made the promised screencasts yet?

And the answer is less obivious: we had some serious problems with the new code of the windeco; Thomas is a great hacker about graphics, one of the best I know, but he’s still an human, and needs some time to debug the problems that may eventually come up. Especially, there’s a nasty bug that right now makes the GUI flashing a bit when resizing (just when using the oxygen windeco)… seems a problem with the painting updates, and the complicated background does the rest.
Fortunately, it’s stuff we are going to fix soon, Thomas is investigating on that right now. If you want to know more technical details, please mail me, or, better, Thomas (be warned, he will write you really technical ones ;-) ).

You should also keep clear in mind that we’ve completely rewritten the painting code of the most important elements, while in the meeting, and we got multiple widgets broken by those modifications. So a general screenshot is out of discussion for now.
Some more specific ones can be done… I’ll see as the development continues.

We’re having a meeting on tuesday, and we’ll discuss many things, including style, look and feel of new widgets, arrows, website updates, and many other Oxygen stuff: pretty cool stuff should be going to happen.

Hope I’ll show you something real in the next post (maybe a Plasma screencast… who knows ;-) ).
Take care! =)

UPDATE: Forgot to say, as someone reported: the windeco is red (the red color is just temporary, placed there by Thomas as a placeholder) when the window doesn’t use the oxygen style. That’s indeed a great thing, and we will use this feature to have a windeco that looks detached from the window on GTK and other windows where we can’t “merge” the two things into an unique element.

P.S.: I wrote this post at 1:30 AM, after a really tiring day… it will certainly be full of grammatical/spelling errors and such stuff… and the wordpress editor doesn’t help! sorry!