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 :P.
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.

Yesterday has been the last real day of the meeting.

First off, the “revolutionary idea” of the day, getting rid of that everything-blue feeling given by the color scheme that KDE always shipped with its default palette (at least we’ll propose to do that), and pick another color to use for the “active” part, so selection, highlight, hovering, and all this kind of stuff.

And we chose yellow for that. (I know someone is probably going to hit us for all those revolution we’re bringing =) )

Well, we won’t use a shiny or very light yellow, it will be a yellow a bit oranged… can’t tell you the exact RGB because we haven’t decided yet what the color will be, but we’ll choose one that looks great on sliders, on buttons, on tabs, on white, etc…
What do you think of that?

So the journey started really well, and we decided to review another really important part of the style: The Buttons.

Those are the buttons you are going to have in KDE 4: (from left to right they show the following statuses: normal, hovered, pressed, selected)

Unfortunately this is not a screenshot, but just the mockup; it would have been really hard to screenshot all the buttons in all the statuses. Anyway, the actual code gives results really close to what you see in the mock (you are able to find really subtle differences just with kmag, and those are going to be fixed), except for the pressed status, that we still need to finish (the button doesn’t change the color, only the shadow reduces its size).

For the windeco, the animations are pretty much implemented, and it’s really going to be completely finished in the next week. Me and David worked some more on the websites, hopefully we manage to update them soon.

The day ended with a visit to the center of Milan in the night. Everyone liked it very much, especially David - unfortunately it was very late so we couldn’t go into shops or visit other areas of Milano - and we “just” saw the Duomo/Castello Sforzesco area. We walked *a lot*, like 4 hrs through Milan, when we came back, at 2 AM, we were really tired. The guys just quickly picked up their stuff from my house, and very very quickly they went back to the hotel. In the morning of the following day, they came here to give me back the keys (I went to sleep as I got home, I was *really* sleepy, the other guys can confirm) and we all said goodbye.

With that the meeting really finished, and David brought Nuno and Casper at the airport by car.

Here are a couple of pics from the meeting (sorry, all the other pics I took looked very bad =P):
They’re quite big, be sure to see them at a smaller size, else they’ll look a bit crappy

• David and Nuno having fun. Nuno layed on that blue ball for pretty much the entire meeting
• David relaxes while hacking on the dolphin icons

As a positive final note, Thomas is finally committing the code for the windeco (I was waiting for him and he was waiting for me… not a really productive approach ). This also mean you’ll get free screenshots soon =)

P.S. For those of you who asked, I’m not aggregated on planetkde.org yet, but that’s not really my fault, as I sent the mail asking to be aggregated there, but no answers yet. Hope I will soon! =)