10:03 AM

So its Xmas Time again :)

posted under by Pinheiro | Edit This
It seams it was only yesterday I did my first Xmas decorative thing for KDE, but it was already 5 years ago, wow time flies :)


2010 promises to be a great year for KDE, 4.4 simply rocks, Oxygen will have a joint meeting next February with the plasma people, and some Kwin people as well, so great fun coming.
For now have fun and be happy :D MERRY XMAS!


P.S. Fixed the link and haded a new almost wallpaper version off it (its not an wallpaper) here

10:32 AM

Kmail icon test

posted under by Pinheiro | Edit This
So because I redefine the meaning of the word busy, I had been letting the usability studies fall behind terribly, but the good think about being KDE is that there is so much of us willing to step in and help. In this case it was Björn Balazs that created this test and I warn you its not an easy one :) have fun with it :).

P.S. its my birthday today so thanks Björn for the gift ;).

6:05 PM

KDE what it always was

posted under by Pinheiro | Edit This
To me KDE was never Software, it was the people, so I'm very happy to be able to say today "I AM KDE" :)



I hope I can find some time to do a secreencast of all of the new goodies in the oxygen theme. 4.4 will be in my opinion the best desktop the KDE people has ever produced.

6:40 PM

Oxygen screencast

posted under by Pinheiro | Edit This
So i spent a few minutes setting up this screencast of the progress so far in Oxygen Animations, unfortunately there is no real good place to store the ogg file :( and the youtube compression make it look a bit bad (please view in hi def)
Any way enjoy we will publish more as soon as we get more animations in.
a torrent to a better avi file.

12:07 PM

A small post for a not so small screenshot .

posted under , by Pinheiro | Edit This
If you are that type of user that uses KDE from trunk them this might not be new to you, but for the rest of the world here goes a screenshot showing some of the stuff Hugo Pereira and I have been working on in Oxygen windeco.

Anew color theme that might work better on some less optimal screens, the windeco is now much more configurable and you can set its to be extremely thin or bigger if you so desire, the active glow as been improved, we have new windec buttons that have better contrast and great animation effects.
If you can build oxygen windeco from trunk please have a test go with it for a few days and tell us what you think of it.

5:36 PM

What have I been up to?

posted under , , by Pinheiro | Edit This
So much stuff.
First thing first, icons yep that what I do mostly, one of the nice aspects of working in KDAB is being closer to people that work on several other stuff in kde that you tend not to talk in a regular basis, like Pim people for example, so after work latly I have been doing lots and lots of pim icons, its a total remake of the ones we had, basacly making them look a bit better on a new color sckeam im prepping up for KDE 4.4 and Oxygen.
(nothing major just a fix for low quality screens that make oxygen widget theme look like "snow white", no no preview yet I'm still testing some solutions and maybe we will need to tweak oxygen main gradients a bit, btw hpereira as been working on several aspect of oxygen as well, and the new oxygen windeco looks great).

Any way back to icons, so this is just a snapshot of what I been up to as oxygen and icons goes since last post.
P.S. not all icons are mail icons obviously.

4:47 AM

Oxygen is dead, long live Oxygen

posted under , by Pinheiro | Edit This
Today Hugo Pereira Da Costa hacker extraordinare of Nitrogen, the very popular window decoration theme in kde-look, merged it into Oxygen, this means that we will be able to have just one theme that can do what oxygen and ozone did and much much more. We will keep working on new options for its and removing options that can be removed. The shadow/glow generation code is being enhanced to offer more options and better glow. It introduces a new approach to the division between oxygen and ozone dilemma, that was suggested by another great hacker/designer Thomas Luebking, that ofers a nice option to people that want to color active and inactive windows in different colors, without making it look completely awkward.

"The oxygen style and window decoration have been the primary reason which made me switch to kde4 a couple of years ago. The window decoration at that time had however too few configuration options to my taste, and so Nitrogen (a fork of the original Oxygen) was born, then posted to kde-look. I got pretty excited when it was added to kde SVN repository about a month ago due to its (unexpected) popularity on kde-look, as a replacement for the previous Ozone fork. Today's even more thrilling, since we went one step further and merged Oxygen and Nitrogen, in order to have a one-and-only full-featured Oxygen decoration for the next kde release. The new Oxygen has customizable button and window border sizes, configurable drop-down shadows, and provides a nice highlight to the active window title bar in a way that is similar (but nicer looking IMHO) than what Ozone would do. It also allows one to define window-specific settings that overwrite the defaults. Not to mention that this brings me an official ticket into the wonderful Oxygen team, and we're all pretty excited about future plans and new features we will bring to users soon, starting from where we are now."
Hugo Pereira Da Costa....

Don't you love Open Source?
Its a great day.

6:28 PM

Random part II (the revenge of svn)

posted under , , by Pinheiro | Edit This
Today I was working as usual and trying to commit the icons I just finished, wen I realized I can't not today, should not be anything important for me, I can commit tomorrow, but for some reason I couldn't work on other icons, for some reason I see the commit as closure if I don't do it I cant move on, Interesting how the human brain works.
Any way I thought I could spend some time to show some of the icons I did in the past days.

There are some Scribus Kplato kdevelop and KdePim icons there, and they are all in svn :)

4:27 PM

For the future.

posted under , by Pinheiro | Edit This
In the past few days I have been working in so many different things I have a hard time keeping track of all of them, but all of them are moving in a reasonable pace, and its great seeing all the pieces falling in to place one by one.
One thing that as been bugging me for the longest time, is the fact that plasmoids need icons, and to be honest I was not to excited about doing icons for all of them, still I was not happy about the fact that they were hijacking oxygen icons and creating a visual mess were one would not know if that was the plasmoid or the application the icon belonged to.

So we really needed to fix this issue.... today I think I found a possible answer, the basic idea is that all plasma apps (plasmoids) use the same base icon same shape, they can simply make one by placing an image under it and cropping it correctly. We could bend the rules a bit and in some cases place meaningful objects on top of it like a finger a arrow etc. but still keeping the basic shape. That way we will avoid confusion, make it easy for plasmoid developers to get an icon, and have a kick ass looking set of icons.


Well this is the basic idea, my first implementation of it
Its not finished and its just the basic shape still a long way to go, but think its really "clicable", witch is important for touch based devices were I see this little applications to have the brightest future..

5:17 PM

Random icons

posted under , by Pinheiro | Edit This

This is just a really quick post to show some of the icons i been working in the past few days, mostly kdevelop icons and office like ones, also made a couple for Kontact. And made a new overlay for unmounted devices.

Hope you like it, couple more done, an uncountable number to go :-) .

In case you are wondering the first ones are part of a group (kdevelop) were the particular theming uses special green, and they can be showed out of context so the context part is needed...

6:25 PM

More office icons!

posted under by Pinheiro | Edit This
Lately, like for the last 2 months or so I have been doing 1 or 2 icons before going to bed for one of the list of icons I have in my todo, and that work's! Those lists are gueting smaller and smaller, Scribus list for example is completed in what was the pure freedesktops extended list. (I'm now doing the other ones).
Also the list for kdevelop is going well and should be done soonish.
But we have another list that we are just starting to make, the koffice list, me and mostly Dario Andres (known for is work at bugs.kde.org the bugtracker and the crash handlert). And just because oxygen is such a complete theme we found out that about 50% of those icons are already done without moving a finger or in this case a cursor :).
But some times its does not work like that.
This night was doing some office icons for Scribus, this ones....
The first one is crop and the second is a updater of text frames via external to the document a text element.
Because crop is also used in koffice I decided to mark it checked in that list, but it turns out we didn't had it in that list we completely missed a folder that had nothing less than 60 icons :( and we might have missed more, so 2 more done 60 more to do is todays total :).

10:15 AM

Just wanted to say that I am.

posted under by Pinheiro | Edit This


And I think any one that works with the wonderful group of people KDE is, as to feel inspired too.
Congrats KDE for 4.3.

P.S. If you don't like how it looks, be sure we do our best. Some people like it personally I love it. But there is no fits all solutions, for starters screens have a deep influence on how the entire thing looks and most screens out there are rather bad.

1:15 PM

A new test!

posted under , by Pinheiro | Edit This
So the k3b test ended with a record of people taking it, more than 7000, we should publish a resume of the test results with the most interesting results we had, overall I can say that the icons we had submitted all except one passed the test, the only one that did not passed the test was erase CD that a been changed to this...



Seams most people think this is a better metaphor than the one I provided. Cool!

So in the same place as last time we now are featuring a new test for kdevelop

There are some changes made in the test, now it includes 5 languages so that language differences and localization can be addressed better than in the K3b study, also I'm really not expecting extremely high good results one this one because its extremely abstract concepts, and maybe only people that work with IDE's can tell the difference any way as usual every one is invited to take the test and there are no wrong answers. Also let me send a special thanks to every one that helped me setting up this new test could have not done it without you, THANKS.

4:36 PM

KDE People!

posted under , by Pinheiro | Edit This

I love KDE and the main reason for that was allays obvious to me, that KDE was much more than a desktop environment, KDE was the people, the love they put into it. I completely stole the totally amazing photos Marijn Kruisselbrink took, to make that little collage.
On an unrelated note, but truly amazingly event to me, I will be working for KDAB and this will allow me to keep doing design work, and contribute to KDE as well. All of this made my day and also my year. Yes I'm very very happy.

5:46 PM

Fixing a bug, some icons and working on the test.

posted under , , by Pinheiro | Edit This
Firstly the icons, its nothing special just some not so exciting icons, I did for the office set,connect and unconnect text bits nothing much, there is also a new eraser for the CD I just committed.
We also managed to fix some visual bugs in air task-bar theme that were making the inactive buttons much to similar to the active one, think its much better now, and it was backported into 4.3 yey for notmart. Also made some minor changes to the decorations in air plasma them, its prettier now... (screenshots as soon as I get a working trunk here.)

Last, managed to show a preview of the upcoming test to the people at kdevelop people and I am currently waiting for the review. (this time we will have German, English and Spanish versions...more coming)
So as my friend Guilhermo Amaral says TTFN (tahhh taahh for now) :) see you guys tomorrow.

7:13 PM

We are getting there.

posted under , , by Pinheiro | Edit This
Around 4-5 years ago, the appeal project project created Oxygen, original people in the creation of oxygen are my good friends David Vignoni, (The wonderful master of nuvola), and Kenneth Wimer, (the man behind all of kde 3.x artwork management).
I just joined later on on a invitation, over time I grew fond of this 2 guys, and discovered, much of myself in them, also there were my teachers. David as a master in checking for details and always trying to overcome ourself, and Ken in the skills one as to acquire to produce something meaningful in OSS.
I somtimes forget to say thanks to this 2 persons, you guys ROCK, you changed my life.

Now all of this to say that 4.3 is around the corner, 6 more hard working months have passed and oxygen is more alive than ever. And we could not have done it without the help of KEN and David.
3 dots looking into the future, yes this is dot 3 . IT seams just yesterday we started making "prettier pictures".
Maybe tomorrow I have more icons to show, the ones I did today are boring :)

1:48 PM

Develop, develop develop!

posted under , by Pinheiro | Edit This
As promised yesterday, today I show some of the icons we have been working with the kdevelop guys. This are just first tries to get them right, I don't do development and I need help designing them.Today I tested the..... test we have been working on for kdevelop, and i think I failed the questions in the test :). Next week we should debut the new test stay tunned...

5:38 PM

Back to work as usual.

posted under , , , , by Pinheiro | Edit This
Mofux asked me just a few minutes ago how come I stooped blogguing like I was, and i said that " I don't have much time for that and honestly all my professional issues are getting on my nerves".
But that got me to think that the best I can do is do what I do that is (working, and talking about it), well at least it doesn't hurt, and I can still have some one telling-me "We just copy vista windows 7 or what ever", (I don't really mind that anymore). I love everyone.
So in my long quest to keep myself busy, I found new itches to scratch, and some old ones as well...

itch #1 koffice like icons,

itch #2 Kdevelop icons, (screen-shot tomorrow)

itch #3 making new tests (probably about kdevelop)

itch #4 making reports for the old tests (got some volunteers to help-me on that, should be great fun).

itch #5 get back on all the people that I talked to during Akademy on all the work we are supposed to do.

and hitch #6 get back to daily blogging.

This should keep me away from thinking about real life and other nonsense like that :).

11:10 AM

Take the test

posted under , , by Pinheiro | Edit This
I'm just back from the GCDS. and had a great time there with all of the KDE people and some of the gnome people as well.
I had the opportunity to finally meet the tango people and they are great :). Juts like us they the best they can to make the open source desktop rock.
My talk was about 2 things, the KDE open service, (got great feedback from several distros about it) and the making the desktop you need... (another way of saying I don't guess what the user wants and its better to ask).

So every 15 days we will be conducting icon test on http://www.oxygen-icons.org/survey/, there is no wrong answer just good ones, ask everybody you know to take it, I'm very interested on the opinions of the people that use the computer occasionally and never used KDE.
The first test is about some icons in K3B, its very fast to do the test, follow the link and see all the wonderful stuff http://www.apliki.de/ did for us, find out more in http://www.usability-methods.com/en.
The first feedback was rather good and we already know ways on how to conduct the test in a better fashion specially as the specific wording for each element goes...



So take the test have fun with it, ask your friends and family to take it, there is no wrong answer, so enjoy. I will try to publish some results in the end, (will not be as simple but I will try at least to give a small report, on specific issues such as localization.

4:18 PM

I have another question?

posted under , by Pinheiro | Edit This
This is supposed to be format CD/DVD etc... I know its not perfect but I'm a bit short on magical ideas for format, (or erase that also exists) and I have to do it before the week end so that the usability study can be launched still in good time, the study will test several different ideas for this icons...

This is format cd :) (I know I know its not obvious).


I have also made a new burn cd icon to put in the same test.



We had an icon for this action But i think this one is better, any way something to test also.

5:57 PM

I have a question!

posted under , by Pinheiro | Edit This
Hopefully in the next few days I should have a Usability test that I have been working on with Björn Balazs from apliki.de on the K3B icons in that study I will pose the same question I'm about to pose now.
And hopefully a few more options, that will come from the feedback of this post.
So the question is......
"Data cd" 1 or 2?....
1
2

Don't think to hard, just fire the first thing that pops in your mind, that is the best way to judge a icon IMO..also if you have an better idea please share...I will try to include it in the usability test.

P.S Ofcourse the numbers will have to be redone for each size and the document as well... Its one source file for each icon. meaning this one = 14 files 7 png's and 7 svgz's.

8:24 PM

The air we see...

posted under , , by Pinheiro | Edit This
Today the great Marco Committed air into svn.

Let me just tell you a bit about air, air is a direct descendant of the air wallpaper, I made the first sketch of it the same day I made the wallpaper, and it tries to make the people that found the Oxygen theme "to black" happy. There is no one fits all design, and hopefully with air we can make a wider spectrum of people love KDE. ( in the future I think we can still make a couple more themes)
Its still we hope coherent, there are a lot of small details that are shared with oxygen both qt theme as plasma theme. That gives it a feeling of belonging as part of the same experience.
We introduced a brand new element in plasma theming, a cropped background the is placed on the plasmoid canvas, (you will see this in the future taken to new heights as it opens a fantasist new set of opportunities to designers).
Its transparent, people love transparent stuff :) (we did some effort to avoid contrast issues, but with certain wallpapers there could be a bit of a problem, nothing much dough...(you still have oxygen theme that is very contrasted)).

We try in KDE 4.3 introduced a new way of branding KDE, were more than the KDE brand we try to share an experience, "the KDE experience" , that you can enjoy in your distribution... And work as already began with some major distributions were we are working together to create that experience for you, and maintaining mostly intact the branding of your distribution.... Its working pretty well so far...

6:35 PM

Sharing a brand.

posted under by Pinheiro | Edit This
After reading many of the comments, on Aseigo blog I reached to the conclusion that most people did not get the idea.
We don't want to kill each of the distributions own branding, we want to share, I would not slap a KDE logo on top of your distribution logo, nothing like that.
What we are after is creating something that is recognizable across the room something people can see as recognizable, a "hey that is pretty and I have seen it some ware else". I would do my best to keep a strong visual connection to the specific distro brand but in a way that one brand doesn't kill the other.
I see distros having no problem on using the icon theme, that is a huge part of the branding part, distros do in that remark little to no modifications to it, same goes to oxygen widget theme, usually the major modifications are done on the "easy part" the wallpaper, splashscren and kdm.
So if a distro can share a huge portion of the branding value with KDE, how come we can't do the same for the easy stuff as well???

Don't think this is a totally innocent move from us, more than the making the co-branding of distros I am interested I'm making bridges between the downstream artists and us, so in the future we will be all working together improving and creating a myriad of desktops and brands that people can perceive as one and many, as unique but also versatile, as one experience that comes in many flavors.

This can only be achieve if we all talk and have methods of sharing problems, and propose solutions. There is allot to gain and nothing to lose out of this experiment.

4:46 PM

3 more

posted under by Pinheiro | Edit This
As promised 3 more winners.

Simone Lazzaris sent this one, still unnamed.

Midnight_in_Karelia, great pic from Anastasiya S. Litvinenko.


Rings of Saturn by Zoltan Vass.

5:51 PM

Announcing the first 3 winners

posted under by Pinheiro | Edit This
As usual the title says it all....

In no particular order ....
Aghi by Matteo Nobile.


Altra, by the games art master It-s, Eugene Trounev (you rock)


And Finally "Evening" by Christoph Kummer

Tomorrow we will announce the 3 remaining ones . stay tunned they should be in svn in no time.

Hope you all enjoy them as much as I do.

2:00 PM

Building a brand.

posted under , by Pinheiro | Edit This

The last weeks we have been thinking and thinking on what should be the default wallpaper for the upcoming kde 4.3. This is always a very complicated decision because is one of the most prominent branding elements on kde specially now that we do all of the marketing artwork revolving around that single wallpaper..
IN the mid of the discussion i had the idea that we could try to make branded version of our default wallpapers for the distros totally free of charge, It-s agreed with me that we could do that....I thought This could be just the beguiling of greater cooperation on shared branding between kde and the distros... Thre are loads of subjects as branding and artwork goes were we could cooperate in way it would benefit kde and the distros as well... I shared my basic idea with promo people and the rest of the artists in oxygen... and Aaron evolved the concept pretty nicely...

So we officially announce the kde branding service, supposed to be a platform for your distro branding needs and what kde can do in that regard, we will start with something simple as wallpapers, (maximum impact minimum effort) and try to evolve from there.

Any way Aaron http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/06/building-brand-together.html said it much better...

5:48 PM

The truth hurts.

posted under , by Pinheiro | Edit This
Thats what I have discovered the last days over what wallpaper should we remove from KDE to make room for the new ones.
Nobody loves my vector sunset. Snif snif, don't get it it has no bubbles nor is it black it as a bit but ist not to much, and now its going away, and im going to cry :).... OO cruel cruel world.
And now I have to say goodbye to my all time favorite best wallpaper.

Vector sunset, we had some fun times didnt we ? :)
P.S. never fear all of the ones we remove will be just moved to KDE artwork ;)

we wont let you die my precious. nhaahahhahaha, my prechioussss :)


3:57 PM

wallpapers that are wosome...

posted under , by Pinheiro | Edit This
This is just a small post to show a small preview of the extremely narrow down wallpaper short list.

The kde people sent me some of the best stuff I have ever seen, and I had a really hard time narrow them down to this 12.... that im only showing in small sizes so the original creators can still do what ever they want with them after we chose the 5 that will go it to replace 5 old ones, (yes 5, 2 would be soooo unfair to everybody that submitted his wonderful pictures .)

And this means we have now 5 wallpapers that are going to say goodbye to the default set.... And in your opinion witch 5 should those be??? This means witch 5 wallpapers should in your opinion be removed from the default 15 we ship today in 4.2???


They are in total random order....

P.S. Many many thanks to everyone that submitted wallpapers the little competition was of extreme quality, and I'm very sorry to the ones that did not made it to the final 12. This does not say anything about the quality of your work.

O and BTW..........;)

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