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.

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! =)

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.