Yes, the new planet went live finally today, with a new fresh look which takes it out from the last nineties and brings it down directly to the modern times.

The design has started at akademy, on wade’s commission, and then got several rounds of refining and polishing, last of which been done by nuno who was trying to accomodate the usual bikeshed that developers’ taste brings up.¹

We still have to work some more on it, pixel perfectionness is the first thing that comes to my mind, then some more fluidity in the layout (thanks to felipe who told me is working on a patch for it), and, most important of all, someone that knows about CSS and HTML that can give a hand. Jonathan has done a terrific work, but, as he says, that’s the best that his web skills permits him.

Then we need to refine all those little things like alignments, shadows, and so on…

Anyways, already a great improvement, no?

Enjoy the new planet!

- Your beloved Roophie

¹ no offence meant, we already cleared that up, just… history!

so, today’s blog entry is presented in fuzzy vision, for solidarity to drunk people.

Yesterday I was feeling pretty pissed off by how things were going. But fortunately, the KDE community demostrated once more how great and friendly it is. =) I received a lot of virtual hugs and good words on IRC, on private mail and in comments. And I’m really thankful to everyone of you for the kind words, they really helped me. =)
Sebastian turns out to be our most favourite teddy bear ever, and today, despite he woke up at 5 AM and was just back from a long journey, popped up on IRC and pinged me, we explained ourselves, and in a few minutes the atmosphere and everything was back to the usual KDE hugs and kisses. Misunderstandings are pretty bad, but fortunately now all seems good. Or, as sebas writes… I love teddy bears! =)

So, today I finished my mockup for the battery, and sent it to the Plasma devel mailing list. I’ll show it also here, so that I’ll gather some more feedback.
However, before I’ll show it, a couple of notes:
The icons (especially brightness icons) are temprorary, as you might guess. I’ll probably add a brightness label too, I was just feeling lazy .
Some icons will probably also need to be made ad-hoc, for now I just borrowed some from the icon theme. In place of the ‘java’ icons there will be icons specific to each profile.

Apart for that, this is the mockup for the popup that will appear clicking on the battery in the panel, while on planar (desktop/dashboard/media-center…) contianments there will be just the ’status’ part (the part above the line) with a little togglable button (label for it? “options…”?) bottom-right which will slide out the configuration options and will make the plasmoid look like the following mockup, which is designed, as I said, for the panel.

Some other points that are worth noticing:

• I tried to pack up the space, and manipulating the background with inkscape is not the easiest thing ever. I’m sure that the end result (especially with better font rendering) will look less cluttered.
• a ‘brightness’ label on the slider might be good, I was just hoping for cleaerer icons. let’s see how this turns out.
• the checkbox “disable warnings” will become another thing, used to toggle “presentation mode” (no autosuspend, no warnings, no screensaver, …)
• yes, I will show the CPU frequency in the progressbar
• we need better wording =)

Ok, so, after the notes… here it is!

And, yes, this is meant to become the controller for powerdevil. =)

As a sidenote, and to unveil the last part of my title, lately I got pretty annoyed with the status of the development of raptor so far. Especially with the estimated developed times being 20.000 years (I’m saying the truth, check here if you don’t believe me! (towards the end)) . To put it bluntly, things were simply stagnating for way too long. So I sit down, met, talked to and recruited some devlopers (namely Dario ‘drf’ Freddi of PowerDevil’s fame, Davide Bettio and Lukas Appelhans), we created a git repo, and we started the fun.
We’re being hosted at github for now, like arora, and we plan to merge back to SVN right before moving to kdereview.

The repo URL is: http://github.com/ruphy/raptor.

The biggest work will likely be the view, so if you have some expertise in QPainter, layouts, or computer graphics, and feel like you want to give us a hand, don’t exitate to drop us (or me) a line or fork the repo on github. =)

So, now, our stated goal is to have raptor ready for 4.2, with *at least* basic functionalities and legacy category support.
Note that, once we’ll have some usable code, we’ll badly need some feedback from users so that we can see what we can optimize further and what are the concepts that work better, so that we can then optimize the menu the best way possible.

We’re all motivated and dedicated to do it, we’ve just completed the design phase, and me and drf will meet in RL weekly for some code sprints on it, too. And we’ll also be joining our forces with our good friend Ivan Cucik (please pardon me the accents, ivan =) ), author of Lancelot, to be able to faster kick, kickoff, off.

Wow, that was long! Later on!

don’t really know why I chose this moment to blog, or why this argument, I’m not even sure this should appear on the planet, as I’m pretty pissed off now, and just can’t get asleep because of that. certainly utf 8 chars look good on a title, but please feel free to skip this blog entry if it’s not in the mood for you, i don’t want to make this a bad day for you. i’m sure you’d actually skip it anyways when you would realize that, so i shouldn’t even really bother telling you. but whatever. you’ve been warned. so i’m being pretty pissed off because of how are going things currently with me and kde. since around one week i guess. or well, maybe not about me and kde. there’s not been any significantly episode so far that puts me in the mood I am now, so maybe it’s not kde. but people stepping on your toes all the time, or always being overcomed, or making a lot of sacrifices for barely no reward or anything can kill anyone’s motivations. and no, this time I’m really not the exception to the rule. note that i’m not pointing my finger at anyone as being culprit of this. not even you sebas, i (now) know you’re stressed as hell. so maybe it might simply be me being silly, idiot and pathetic. so yeah, please, anybody, don’t feel accused or anything like that.

however, the fact remains: I’m back on blogging. finally. and, on a related note, i’m also burning out. so maybe i need it. maybe reading all the nice people will stop me from wanting to just give up on the stuff. dunno. but fuck, yeah, i’m not even rereading the post this time. that’s pathetic. i’ll just stop here wasting space on the planet. bye.

Davide ‘WindowsUninstall’ Bettio asked me to add a note to remind that i might have blogged in another happy moment before now too. but as i said in the opening, i don’t really know why i did that right now.  the happier ones will follow i guess.

happy birthday to you!!! =)

Yea, I know it was yesterday (the 18th) but you decided to disappear from IRC… … and I can’t blame you for that.

On a sidenote, what did I become now, the official KDE birthday reminder? At least judging from all the posts I’m writing lately…
Hmm… this has to be fixed… but… never fear! I will be back blogging about stuff asap!!! =)

Happy birthday David! Happy birthday Eugene!

(that’s just alphabetical order)

For those who don’t know, today it’s the birthday of two of our great fellow artists! David ‘davigno’ Vignoni and Eugene ‘it-s’ Trouneuv. To their health!

(to be sincere I wanted to put here a birthday e-card but then I considered that this would have resulted in being more creepy than what I eventually already am. So, take just the words please )

For the rest, I’m continuing with the complete graphic revamp of this blog, sorry if it doesn’t look completely shiny now, but I will make it so in the next days. Great inspiration in my mind…

And a flood of articles are coming too… I just didn’t want to post anything until the revamp had finished, and I’m only making an exception to the rule just for this special occasion.

See you soon my lovely fellows!

P.S. krunner is coming along greatly!

“Hello new splashscreen”.

No, seriously now, here it is: (more…)

Given that I had to do it for the release-team mailing list[¹] I’m going to link the more complete version of the cursor theme here too.
This is much more complete not yet perfect, but much better. I just noticed the watch has a small glitch when rotating, but it’s a minor thing (which I’m fixing right now). Here you can download the white version, the yellow version and the green version. Yes, this one is for you Sebas. =)

Don’t worry, I will make a proper release with a proper announcement with all the colors linked and all this stuff when it will be the right time… this is meant to be a 5 minutes post, already lost too much time on endless mail (and IRC) discussions in these days.

If you’re interested, Harald ‘apachelogger’ Sitter made a screencast showcasting the cursors in all of their beauty (unlike the pic showing a naked Zack ).

And here is the original video, of a much greater quality, mp4 format (HE-AAC/H.264). Use youtube only if you really cannot play this, this is so much better.

See you soon!

–
¹ They seem to think that a cursor theme might break something, or they have other points which I still haven’t understood… but I don’t want to polemize… anyway, I seem to need to convince them to include the theme in 4.0.

Hello!

I’d just like to wish you everything you wish yourself for Christmas!

And to give you the promised present…

(more…)

Although I’m skeptical that all of the problems with the release candidate can be fixed in only one month, a rough first release seems a small price to pay for the significant long-term advantages offered by the transition.

Definitely well said Ryan Paul! =)

P.S. Getting a bit annoyed from these ADs, hope they do not get too much in the way. Please tell me if they do.

UPDATE:
I just want to remember to all the commenters that, because the cursors are SVG, keeping the design all the colors can be changed in seconds, with awesome results, and this operation is also automated by the fanthastic perl script done by David Faure just for me.
I will ship for sure a yellow theme other than the white one, for accessibility (Olaf made me promise this at aKademy) and maybe also a dark one, for similar purposes. I will make all the other colors (plus nice combinations of them) available on my homepage (currently under maintainance), maybe also some variants to the theme. =)

Hello,

this is a very quick post to show the further improvements I’ve achieved on the Oxygen cursor theme.

(more…)