I was feeling particularly inspired this morning, so I fired up inkscape and tried to mess around with the gradients, in order to create a new revision of the sheet. I knew that it wasn’t going to be a full redesign, since we don’t want a completely new design that breaks consistency, but simply a reshape of the colors and gradients to make it look more modern.

I concentrated mostly on the 32×32 size, since it’s the one that is the most commonly used, and I think I got pretty good results there. I’m also quite satisfied of the other sizes: i might still play a bit with the contrast of the 16×16 icon (the smallest) but I think I’m there.

This is what I came up with: (the new set is the one on the right)

So, what do you think?

EDIT: Ah, something I forgot… I was also thinking of putting the folded corner on the top-right, instead of bottom-right as it is now. Opinions?

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!

No, seriously now, here it is:

Hope you like it. Happy new year everyone, may 2008 bring the best things to you! =)

For KDE, it will surely be a great one, the launch of KDE 4, the start of a new era, and then… but, hey! will say more of this yaddayadda in the next post… ;-)

Ah, and see you next year¹! :P

P.S. I’ll commit this into SVN in a second…

UPDATE: as nobody seems to read my answers, I’m pasting here my comment #7, which was intended as a reply for the first ones, but nobody seems to really have seen it.

Something better will be done for 4.1, I promise, it’s just that I couldn’t do anything else (and really, anything else) for 4.0 except than re-adapt the existing code for the old splashscreen to the new artwork: we’re in feature freeze now…

This is really, really the best thing we could have ever come up with, because of the limitations in ksplashx. It’s not the best thing ever, but I still think the final result *is* nice, after all.

I would like to add that I *will* add a progressbar, like in the mockup Nuno did

–
¹ Sorry, but I can say that only once in a year, can’t loose the opportunity ;-)

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 :P).

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.

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

And to give you the promised present…

With David Miller, in these two days I’ve done quite a big rush on the cursor theme, as you can see on its cgit page.

We’ve targeted to complete at least a basic set to be given away as Christmas present, and as preview of what will be included in KDE 4.0 as default cursor theme (at least I hope so, I’m writing the mail to kde-core-devel right now).

The clock cursor is the big missing, altough the pointer+clock is already there. And I made the hand thinner.

Here are the links to the white and yellow themes, installable, but first the mandatory previews, in random order. :-)

Normal pointer:
Hand:
Contextual Help:
Text, ibeam, xterm, blinking, or however you call it :P :
Grabbing:
Pencil:
Diagonal resizing:
Pointer + clock:

UPDATE: Download the newest sets which are linked in the other post. They work better

The cursor theme is licenced under the license LGPL version 3, and is Copyrighted (C) 2007 by Riccardo Iaconelli and David Miller.

Please note xterm, I think it’s just lovely. :-) And it *does* work greatly on text!

Actually, there are more cursors drawn in the git repo but I haven’t created all the config files yet. I will try to sit down with fredrikh and finish this off too. Then I’ll probably have to ask jpetso to work with me on a sane spec for cursor naming, currently this is all a plain mess.

Feel free to report me any bugs or usability annoyances in the theme. =)

Ah, because I remembered you asked, I will try to make a lefthanded version of the theme too. And maybe some other colors… and… who knows, maybe some will be with the Tango palette. ;-)

Have a very happy Christmas and a good new year!

Bye! =)

P.S. There are two sentences in the text, which are quotes from a song of one of the most known groups in the history of music. I have a bonus present to the first who can find the two quotes and tell where do they come from, including name of the song. ;-)

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. :D
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.

Here’s the new look of some cursors: (please take some time to look at them, you will appreciate the subtle design much more…)

If you want to track the developement as it happens, or help me testing the theme, please git clone git://people.freedesktop.org/~ruphy/oxy-cursors.git (“fattish” branch is atm the most updated).
Note that this is still unreleased and might be subject to heavy changes before there is a release. I don’t want to give support on that, I will only when I will have reached a more mature point in the set (and therefore I will have merged the theme in the KDE SVN). Still there is a README file in there, and very useful scripts. ;-)

And yes, pointers for lefthanded will be provided as well.

See you in next post!

And the winner is…

EOS by Vlad Gerasimov! =)

Next post: the new cursor set!

With the announcement of the Oxygen Wallpaper Contest in August, we, the Oxygen Team, intended to have the KDE community give the brand new KDE 4 desktop its face – and the response was overwhelming! Artists and KDE enthusiasts submitted around 2000 high quality pictures, most of them being fantastic wallpapers.

The jury, composed of David Vignoni, Nuno Pinheiro, Kenneth Wimer and myself, had a hard time digging through that stack of contributions due to the sheer size and finally pick the ones which will to be shipped as KDE 4.0 wallpapers.

And so, after this long and tedious time of waiting for all of you we’re finally announcing the big winners of this fantastic contest! =)

NOTICE:
Some people in the comments had some worries, and thought it may look suspicious seeing that some of the winning wallpapers are infact being done by some members of the jury. To them I want to answer the following things, which I’ve already answered in a comment replying to Tina:
We voted in a way so that we didn’t know who was the author of a certain wallpaper, the votes were secret, and we couldn’t vote for our wallpaper (the vote was the medium value of the other votes). The credit file was not associated at all with wallpapers.
So nothing to worry about, we’ve studied a voting system, we voted, and we took up the results *always* trying to make them in the most impartial way possible.
That’s exactly because we knew some of our wallpapers were in the competition. =)

It has been a hard time, but it has been worthwile in the end. =)
Here are the thumbnails, names, and some text about the winners:

So, next common question is: which will be the default? Discover it in the coming days guys, same place. ;-)

I’m announcing you the first wallpaper which is winning the contest. This is not the big winner, but still. This picture is nothing really new, as I already put it as default background in plasma (starting from beta 3), but no-one really knew it was a winner one. ;-)

This is a thumbnail of the great picture, which has been taken from Kenneth Wimer!

Damn, it’s very late, I think I should go to sleep now…. see you all

(Update: tiredness is not an excuse for not closing HTML tags)