davigno

The guys of Cesena Blog, a blog of my hometown, have just published an interview with me.Read the interview (in Italian).

When some time ago I was working on source mimetypes for Oxygen, I also had to do the ruby source mimetype, also known as mimetypes/application-x-ruby. Before starting the icon I knew it would have had a rubin in it, then I went to the official Ruby programming language website and realized they already had a very cool logo. So I did some research and found out there was Ruby Visual Identity Team providing a media-kit with the logo graphics in many formats, included our beloved SVG
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Techwriter’s den writes Five golden rules for a journalist in response to Linux.com’s recent bashing of the oxygen and Gimp projects hope Nathan Willis will have a chance to read Alexandre’s article. Maybe this would also encourage him to actually read the contents of my Conquer their Desktop post.read more | digg story

It’s one month already I relocated to California. It wasn’t a shock since I’ve been here many times in 2006. But this time was for good so I had to face many new things I had no idea, things like getting a Social Security Number, opening a bank account, writing checks in english (for the rent). I also don’t have a car yet so I had to figure out how to reach some places by public transportation.

I have also been to Ikea for the first time. The closer one is located in East Palo Alto which is supposed to NOT be a good neighborhood so it was nice when I jumped off too early from the bus and the Bus driver stopped by to tell me to jump in that it was the wrong stop. I met very cordial people until now. So, the Ikea stop is important in this story because there I bought a desk (as you can see, nothing fancy) and confortable chair to be able to work at home on Oxygen. It was not easy to build the desk without screwdriver and I messed things up just at step 3 :) but in the end it worked!

 

Since I left my lovely 23″ Cinema Display in Italy I’m really thinkinh in getting an 24″ or something iMac. In October I really haven’t any time or energy to work on anything KDE related. Fortunately Nuno and David Miller have been doing a great work filling missing actions icons and improving the ugly ones. There’s still some work to do but I’ll concentrate on designing the applications now. Next coming are for sure Kmail and Kontact. There also some minor changes I’d like to do here and there on the folders, Konqueror icon, Dolphin and to the “new” action badge.

So stay tuned.*PS:* Yes, I read all the crap about the amazingly stupid Linux.com article. Will write something about that soon, but I had this post ready since a couple of days.

Yeah, the rumors where true … I’m about to relocate to California. I’m flying to San Francisco via Frankfurt this monday. It’s not a random crazy instintive move the one I’m doing … if you want to know a bit more … continue reading :)I started doing icon design for passion when I was an computer-science University student, and all the good feedback I got for Nuvola icon theme pushed me to try making of my passion a job. So, back in 2005, while I was at last year of university I officially started an individual company registered in Italy providing custom icon design. I’ve been approached many times by several companies, my poor girlfriend first thought I was going to work at Telecom Italia in Rome, then I was about to work at a web agency in very northern Italy, but then I started collaborating with Suse Gmbh for 4 months, when this was over I almost got hired by Trolltech and I was asked if I would have been available to relocate to Australia, of course I was :) but in the end we ended with the Oxygen sponsorship from home … After all this, in May 2006 I was approached by a brand new californian start up called Meebo.

They were doing a very cool AJAX multi protocol IM service and where really needing a designer to help out with the visual re-design of their sites and services. So, after doing a small project contest “against” a couple of other designers they wanted to meet me and in June I was flying for the first time to world famous Silicon Valley, CA. After a long period working from home in Italy as a consultant, a lot of burocreacy and a bit of lucky I got a H-1B visa, which is a non-immigrant visa that allows me to work in the US as a highly qualified worker. My position at meebo will be “visual designer” and I’m really happy to start this experience. I’ll miss my family, my friends, my new apartment, my town, my food, my language and everything I like of Italy … but I think it’s a very unique opportunity and I’m really thankful to meebo founders that trusted on me and are giving me that chance … and I’m really grateful to my girlfriend too, who is coming with me and will stay until Xmas. I know I’ll come back stronger, more mature and with a lot of work experience that I would not have the chance to do get from my home studio.Meebo is also conveniently located in downtown Mountain View, so I’ll be just around the corner for the big KDE release party happening in January at googleplex :) I won’t desappear from the open source scene, the Oxygen Project is very important to me and I’ll take care of it together with my friends of the Oxygen Team.PS: I know, meebo.com still not allowing Konqueror :) I’ve been able to enter the site by changing the browser agent but seems the site ajax doesn’t work very well with khtml 3.x. Probably if/when Konqueror will use webkit it will work just fine. PPS: For the italians reading, I’m also starting a personal blog in Italian called Meno Nove where I plan to post about my experience living in Silicon Valley etc.

Update 26/Sep/07: Icon have been committed to KDE svn. Usuallly inspiration is good but it’s bad if it’s 7 in the morning and you worked all night long just because you felt you was inspired. Don’t know if this is normal but sometimes when I see a really inspiring icon design I can’t think to do anything else if not drawing a gorgeous icon as well. Thanks Nuno!So, it was sunday night (or better, monday morning) and I couldn’t go to bed because I had to draw something. I knew I would have to wake up at 8 because of an appointment but … Hey, I was feeling inspired. :)The icon that got my attention this time was nothing less than Konqueror web browser. This is one of those icons that we are afraid to do because are very popular applications. I had this idea in mind since some time already: Nothing totally new for Konqueror, it’s the usual globe plus cog but it had to be fit better the Oxygen application icons style. So I put the cog on a compatible 3D perspective and used a shiny nice globe. The cog now looks more like a base for the globe and the stars on the globe form a subtle “K” constellation. This one was a really tough icon with many reflections, and transparencies, but I’m kinda happy with the overall result. The icon scales down very well and has distinctive shape. As always, some retouches might happen before KDE 4. Peace.

It’s in the mouth of everybody … Oxygen icon theme for Gnome! BUM!AFAIK It all started from a post from an italian blogger linking to a so called Oxygen Refit icon theme on gnome-look.org.We have always tried to keep Oxygen icons only on SVN, we asked people using them here in there to kindly remove in name of the freshness of upcoming KDE 4. But we knew that in the end, scripts, rip-offs etc were impossible to control. I find all this rumor around Oxygen for Gnome really interesting. I think there’s a lot of curiosity out there and maybe in the end our artwork will help to get some gnomeys to want to try KDE 4 when it cames out. But more than gnomeys, that at least are already using free software, I hope that our graphics, may help pushing the same curiosity about KDE to Mac and Windows users. That would be awesome.Now, back to the gnome theme. This Oxygen Refit it’s in reality a mix of different icon sets, and is not using all the latest icons … fortunately the author doesn’t seems to have enough experience with standard MIME naming specs to find the correct folder icon … :)

Coming soon. On your desktop.

Second Oxygen meeting is over. I’m already back home in Cesena. 3 hours driving.I’m preparing a blog showing and explaining some of the new stuff I’ve been working on.

For a detailed meeting resume check Riccardo (ruphy) blog (which is in the process to being added to planet).An earlier mockup of the scrollbar can already be found in his blog:Day 1Day 2Day 3With this post I also would like to thanks Riccardo for organizing this and his family for being so nice with us.

So yesterday it was really productive. By my side I’ve been playing with new scrollbars for the style (wait next post). But I also wanted to make Dolphin default toolbar icons looks great. That took a lot of time, specially because every size needed a special version and that’s the result:

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