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. =)

…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.

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!

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! =)

Yesterday it has been a really productive day, we could finally hack toghether for the whole day.

Casper and Nuno sit altogether to check the consistency of all the elements of the style and listed on a piece of paper the name of the elements which still needed some fixing or some revising.
The most urgent parts have turned out to be the groupboxes, the lineedits (and all the widgets that use its drawing code, like the spinboxes), and the buttons. The main problem with groupboxes seemed to be the consistency of corners, their radius was not always the same, it was way too white on top and it was detaching too much from the background. It even seemed to be of another material. Casper hacked a bit and fixed all those stuff during the day with the help of Nuno.

Another nice thing we’ve been working on is the palette - we chose the colours we’d have begun with, and started all our work from there. The actual KDE default palette is just not good enough, and specifically made for Plastik/similar.
Specifically, we radically changed the background color, setting it to a really nice gray. With that, it has been made possible to adjust the two gradients there are on bg.

On the style, all the (useless) space that the scrollbars were using has been completely removed. Now they look much more slim and clean.
David even came up with an idea for the new scrollbar that we will implement, here’s his mockup (really basic, but still effective):

In the meantime I was working on the windeco, and managed to finish all the buttons, including colour changing when hovering, etc…, and it’s 97% completed by now. I’m not posting a screenshot yet because I’m waiting for Thomas to commit some code about authomatic propagation of the gradient pixmap from the style to the windec. That’s also the reason why I’ve chosen not to commit yet - I don’t want to cause any conflict to him. Please do not ask me about windeco screenshots, I won’t make them until his code is there; when it is committed, I’ll do it before you could even ask me to show you that amazing stuff (perhaps a screencast as well).

We have also thought of a lot of other cool effect to implement, Nuno is a really creative guy. The best thing he proposed, IMHO, has been about the replacement for the selected effect in lineedits and derivate widgets. and you will see that soon in a screenshot…

We had dinner in a really cool place near here, a bit expensive, but they cook really in an awsome way. Nuno enjoied very much (as always) the food, and we came back more or less at 1:00 PM, full but happy. If you want the address and the telephone number, just ask me privately, and I’ll give it to you. =)

Stay tuned for screenshots (they will come tomorrow) and some further pic (in the next post, hopefully tonight)
Bye!

Yesterday it has been the first day of the Oxygen meeting, and it all went really nicely.
Sad to say so, but Kenneth had some work problems a couple of days before the meeting and hadn’t managed to come too.
Casper and David arrived more or less at 3:00 PM, and I went to fetch them at the train station. When back, after a little stop at the hotel, we’ve immediately began to work. Unfortunately Nuno was arriving only at 10 o’clock, so we had to wait for him before we could do any agressive modification to the style.
Me and David spent the whole time we had before he was arriving working a bit on the style of the Oxygen Gallery (that will be opened to the public soon) and revising the style of the main Oxygen website.
Casper in the meantime studied the whole codebase of the style and the windeco, and began hacking on it. He polished the whole windeco, and removed the ugly outline that sometimes was appearing. Kinda cool work dude!
We worked hard for some hours, discussing also some Plasma-related things, and then, after dinner, we went by car to fetch Nuno.
When he arrived we had some time for a couple of hacks more on the style, we refined the groupbox (now it looks really great, and far more consistent with the rest of the style).
We discussed possibilities of visual integration with plasmoids, and how should they behave.
We continued to hack ’til 1:00 AM, where we made a little plan for the following day, and finnally said goodnight to everyone.
It has been a really productive day, and others must be the same as well, if we want to get all the things done.
Screenshots are coming!
Stay tuned!