today i accomplished two things besides the usual: i updated my laptop to suse 10 and spent quite a bit of time sketching out plasma details.
the sketches illuminate various visual effects and the general layout concepts i'm aiming for which have largely been living mostly in my head up until now. so now i have a bunch of "storyboards" detailing what chains and transitions and extenders and ... look like. i'll be showing them to ken when i arrive in munich on the 1st of november, hoping it'll spark some inspiration in his mind.
the sketches also enabled me to nail down the theming system. i'm not sure i've seen anything out there quite like it before, but that probably just means it was done 10 years ago in some system i've never heard of ;)
with the suse 10 upgrades there were several shockers: the kde installs i'd built until 9.2 still worked! could this mean that .. *gasp* .. gcc's c++ abi is approaching stability? or is that i just totally lucked out? ;) well, not all was rosy. besides the minor annoyance of kcontrol not showing any entries (kbuildsycoca is not being my friend either atm), my sound didn't work at all and the sound configuration yast module was a gong show until i removed the contents of /etc/modprobe.d/sound at which point it magically worked. at least boot times are snappy and i now have hal, x.org and a decently recent ndiswrapper.
About Me
Labels
- akademy (3)
- amarok (1)
- appeal (1)
- build system (1)
- community (7)
- crash (2)
- d-bus (1)
- dataengine (1)
- dolphin (2)
- events (1)
- family (1)
- free software (1)
- gnome (2)
- graphics (1)
- guademy (1)
- kde (52)
- kde e.v. (3)
- kde; kdegraphics (1)
- konqueror (1)
- krunner (4)
- libs (5)
- lug radio (1)
- media center (1)
- misc (1)
- openid (1)
- oxygen (2)
- performance (1)
- photos (1)
- plasma (26)
- podcast (1)
- pr (1)
- prose (1)
- release (1)
- social (1)
- solaris (1)
- techbase (6)
- travel (6)
- trolltech (3)
- web2.0 (1)
6 comments:
Did you get some inspiration of kde-artists ? or is it ideas you had previously in mind ?
I was wondering too how (and when) would kde-artists job be used ? Some mockups like the ones of Amaury are so beautiful !
I have to second that. I really love Amaury's mockups. Hope you take a look at his blog, if you haven't already.
http://achamayou.blogspot.com/
&pageRe: KDE-Artists mockups
And RE: Amaury's idea in particular:
His, and many others' mockups of file manager point to a much cleaner-looking, approachable interface. And good ideas are abound. (Like the visual trunkation of the path into clickable areas, thus removing the need for "Up" button.)
However, his "kicker" mockup is IMO a nut-job. (i.e. 3 very-sensible but humongously-out-of-place launch buttons)
Which all bring me to a fine point:
I hope that "kicker" will be more like a SuperKaramba surface. This way whatever you/we all decide is visually very cool today, I can change 3 month later and post on kde-look.
P.S. I hope the "Add Tab" button as we know it will die soon. I hope to see an "New Tab" tab (grayed out "ghost of a tab" maybe?) that either leads, or follows the populated tabs. You press on it, and the tab "materializes" into a working tab. IE tabs in Vista seem to move in that direction. :( I should have spoken earlier; now that becomes "copying others' features" again.
i'm concentrating on plasma, not the file manager right now.
and when it comes to the plasma mockups... to be honest, i've yet to see something truly compelling visually; and the concept pieces don't really tell me much about the concept.
the sketches i've done are concept pieces (rather than visual design works) and detail a set of methods to accomplish a specific vision.
Hello, I've posted a synthesis of my thoughts (and all thoughts I could collect) on extenders on my blog. I'll be posting more tomorrow and this weekend. You might find some interesting concepts in the kde-artists forums too.
I have done and am still doing some work on contextual buttons for files in the filemanager too (following an idea from the Appeal project).
Post a Comment