davigno

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

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 … :)

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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Me, Nuno, Casper and Riccardo are meeting for an Oxygen style and windeco mini marathon in Milan, at Riccardo’s place. Thomas will be contributing realtime from IRC channel #oxygen. We met yesterday and will be working hard all the weekend. Updates coming later this evening. Stay tuned.

One thing that is very nice with the new naming scheme for mimetype icons is that now much more file formats are covered. For example, kde used to have just one icon for all the audio format. Now we have 25! :)

This doesn’t mean we are going to have 25 different icons for audio files, but I thought it was a good idea to group file formats and to do an icon for each group. In the I found 5 categories:

• lossy compression: mp3, ogg, acc …
• lossless compression: flac, monkey …
• uncompressed (PCM): wave, aiff …
• midi
• speech

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The nice guys at OpenUsability have prepared a fantastic icon survey.

This survey will help KDE’s usability experts to point us which icons we should change or improve and which are already good. Thanks very much o everybody which will enter the survey.

PS: it doesn’t take very long, and there are no hard questions.

PPS: For the fews that haven’t seen the link to the survey here you go again :)

http://test.openusability.org/UCCASS/survey.php?sid=43

Dolphin, next KDE 4 file manager, looks for folder icon at “mimetypes/inode-directory.png”. Follow current icon identikit:

• Name: inode-directory.png
• Address: oxygen/…/mymetypes/
• Profession: folder icon

All the special folder icons are located under “places” directory and use a different kind of name having “folder-” as prefix… like “folder-important.png” or “folder-yellow.png”.

So my question is: Shouldn’t the regular folder icon be located under “places” directory as well and be called just “folder.png”?

Looking at freedesktop icon naming specification seems like I’m correct (see Table 11. Standard Place Icons names). Then, the new identikit for the regular folder icon would be:

• Name: folder.png
• Address: oxygen/…/places/

Just to spice up this post a bit the new folder also comes in many different tasty flavors:

And of course most of all the special directories are already on svn too.

Missing are:

• home directory
• packages directory
• binaries/software directory

If you think you have a proposal for a special directory that I haven’t thought of yet, feel free to let me know ;)