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. ;-)

Just to let you know I’m preparing a Christmas present… be sure to check planetkde in two days! =)
I had hoped for having the new krunner as present, but unfortunately I won’t make it for Christmas. I will try to finish it before the KDE 4.0 tagging though, I’m full of energies now, so I can probably make it, but won’t promise for now. Root for me! ;-)
Now I think I will just get back to mails, I’ve 1328 unread and 18 in the composer queue… whoa. :D
Btw, eros, email me if you read this!

p.s. much of this post is for you GNUton, as you liked so much the other one. :-)

p.p.s. I love you guys! Really!

p.p.p.s. Disclaimer: all of the above love must be intended in a very manly and opensource way. ;-)

p.p.p.p.s. Do you like the little modifications I did to the blog’s skin/layout?

In this post I’d also like to point out to you about an extremely valuable tool, written by one of my KDE co-hacker and good friend Paolo Capriotti.

I just noticed he blogged about it, I tried it this afternoon when he first shown his prerelease to me, and I must say it really rocks. It’s a tool written in ruby which performs similar tasks than kapptemplate (see kdesdk), but it works with templates and it’s *way* more powerful. It’s written for KDE 4 so that’s also a big plus (meaning automatic generation of CMake file, etc…). =)
It also comes with very handy tools builtin, and does *much* more than just generate empty apps, like it has the ability to add a GPLv2 header license to multiple source files with a one liner command line, or the ability to create skeletons for classes just as simply. Here’s the link to his blog entry:
http://pcapriotti.wordpress.com/2007/11/19/skema-01/

If you’re a developer, you should definitely try it out, it’s at its first release (0.1) after 2 days of developement, but it’s already awesome, and worths the trying. I’m already pretty excited about it. =)

A lot of time passed since my last blog post. And a lot of time has passed with me continously telling to myself to really take a moment or two from the busy workflow of life, and get the time to write on the blog again… the thing is that the period lasts since a lot of time, pretty much since when I misteriously disappeared.

At the time, from the moment when I re-appeared on IRC, every day I said to myself that I really had to write what happened in those two “misterious” weeks (was it two weeks?) to me, why I disappeared so misteriously and what the heck did I do. I wanted to do a full explanation, writing a good post. This was also to explain to the many people who worried during that period (sorry Eugene!) and for who, when I came back, asked me what happened during that time. Exactly the same guys which I’ve answered with these words: «Sorry, can’t explain now, but I’ll write a post on the blog in the next days explaining in detail what happened!».

So, after this episode I realized that I am a liar. ;-)

Because, at the end of each week, the weekend comed, and I each time Sunday night arrived without me having done anything, lacking time for various reason.

Yeah, school began again, and this one (3rd year of high school) is one of the most difficult years, for what concerns the high schools.

In the meantime I lost almost all the interest I had in doing that, and forgot many details. I will write a couple of lines if you really want to know, or I will explain directly to you on IRC or Jabber. Nothing so terrifically interesting though, trust me. ;-)

However, altough I’ve not updated the blog, this doesn’t mean I’ve been dormient. The good thing infact is that I did a lot of work for KDE, some of which very exciting, while some other not, but still a lot of things.

So, I will start with a blogging marathone, and I’ll try to keep up with a one-post-per-day rythm. I’ll start with a big fish, but won’t reveal anything for now. Check the post which is coming out in a couple of minutes… ;-)

Gah, I wanted to write a really short post but as always I end up writing too much…. :\

I leave you with this candy for today, screenshot directly from my desktop:
-Click to show image-

P.S. I want to let you know that I’m going to put some Google Adwords on this blog. However, I won’t keep all the revenues for personal incomings, or this kind of stuff, but I will split the earnings in two parts. I will give 50% of what I earn to Paleo, the guy who is hosting this site (as well as many others, like amarok.kde.org) just for his passion and his admiration versus KDE. He does not receive any financial help, and he provide an extremely valuable service. He is also always online to provide help or any other things we, the hosted, need.

And for that service which he provides for free to the whole comunity, I think he deserves all my respect, and that’s just a way to tell him “thanks a lot dude!”. I will keep the restant 50% for helping myself partecipating in KDE events, covering travel expenses, and all this kind of stuff. You know, I’m just a 16-years-old student, and I’ve got kind of a limited budget… I’ve payed all by myself the past two Akademies, and I’m running a bit out of money. I will try to be as transparent as possible on that, and publicly tell when I will use that money.

This is just for clarification if some people might get this wrong, maybe thinking that I’m trying to monetize their effort, or monetizing KDE. =)

P.P.S. Between the new coming things include an update in the skin of the blog, cursors, and other stuff!

P.P.P.S. Hope this post doesn’t contain too many errors, I’ve not even reread it! ;-)

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)

We’re making a contest to completely renew the set of default wallpapers shipping with KDE 4.
Rules are very simple, submissions are accepted until 00:00 (CET) of the 20th August 2007, resolution should be big enough to fit well into bigger screens and images must be released under a free license (that we will decide with you later).
Remember that we welcome ANY type of art, vectors, photos, pixel art, 3D stuff, pizzas…. and you’re free to choose whatever color or style or message you prefer, the requirement is just that the final work looks good (especially remember that it will be used as a wallpaper).
Basically everything else you need to know is already written on the contest website (done by me), which you can find at http://pd.ruphy.org.

NOTE:
For those who do or do not partecipate in the contest, please spread this link [http://pd.ruphy.org] and this announcement as much as you can! News sites, your blog, everything is good, with your help, we will make the best set of wallpapers ever, and we’ll ship it with KDE 4!

Get pretty pictures, spread the link, have fun, and viva Oxygen!

And our new president drying his underwears on the fire at aKademy 2007 ;-)

Anyway, apart from this joke, Aaron knows I fully estimate him, he is a good friend and we hacked toghether since the beginning of KDE 4.
So good luck dude for this new important role, and continue rocking! =)

Download in:

• Small size (532×356; 286.3 KBytes)
• Medium size (1064×712; 879.6 KBytes)
• Large size (4256×2848; 6.7 MBytes)

So here there are a pair of photos of mine, taken into the garden of my house (click to enlarge):

(No, I’m not photogenic at all ;-) )

See (and recognize) you at akademy, have a nice time! =)