Re: [opensuse-artwork] Base colour and code-name of release

I guess, what we can keep from the mockup is the desktop switching arrows as well as the simple weather widget. Also, having the system tray and notification area as a tab would be a goo idea, simply to separate elements from window, launcher and clock items in the panel. I notice that most of the times, the notification section does little once the system is up and can be isolated instead of having it take up space on the panel. On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 7:43 AM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

On Thursday 23 June 2011 06:26:06 andi robert wrote:

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On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 12:13 PM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

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On Monday 20 June 2011 16:35:25 andi robert wrote:

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On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 5:05 AM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

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On Monday 20 June 2011 02:10:22 andi robert wrote:

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That is good input Jos. I mostly think it a good idea moving away from oxygen because of the lack of customization that you can do on it. QtCurve has a very detailed interface that lets you change just about whatever you want. Something that is not available currently on Oxygen. If you look into kde-look.org you will see that there are plenty more qtcurve configurations for download than Oxygen tweaks. This gives me the impression, that at some level, KDE users want to be able to customize their window styling. But obviously, such is a very personal preference. People from the community can vote and see whether they would like to change this.

Design by committee - I'm not so sure. I know Oxygen isn't super customizable but why does it have to be? It has the most important options (and have you ever seen oxygen-settings?) and simply looks good by default.

If people want QtCurve, they can use it. I'd be all for removing some of the bad default styles from KDE and adding QtCurve instead, with a few nice default configurations shipped by us. It is easy to make that happen - fork the QtCurve package on OBS, add the configurations, submit it back to Factory.

But I wouldn't replace Oxygen by default, it's a really good and modern style. I actually know a few professional designers (of course Mac users) which tell me it's the first linux style they like. And quite it's unique, compared to Mac or Windows or Android.

Oxygen works nicely, there is nothing wrong with it except that it is a very blend color set. Maybe we can change that and bring extra contrast to the Oxygen colors on a window style.

You could default to another color scheme but it would need extensive testing on a variety of screens to make sure it doesn't look bad. I've seen older versions of oxygen (which had more contrast in the background gradient) look absolutely horrible on cheap LCD screens - which are used a lot at companies and in cheap laptops. We don't want to ship something which only looks good on a high-end monitor...

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On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 6:24 PM, Jos Poortvliet wrote: > On Sunday 19 June 2011 23:03:40 andi robert wrote: >> I was thinking we could add custom icons, window styles (qtcurve >> for max compatibility with gtk apps) a new color scheme, and >> custom widgets for the KDE desktop. >> >> This is what I have currently >> >> http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/823/snapshot68.png/ >> >> Although, that image has more. > > I wouldn't deviate too much from the standard KDE look. Especially > Oxygen is very good, well maintained and with oxygen-gtk integrates > GTK apps perfectly (lots of improvements coming with 4.7). With > Oxygen you benefit from the hard work of some incredibly good > artists - they for example optimized the colors to not look crappy > on many old-and-bad monitors. That was difficult work and > something I'd rather not have to re-do. And think about graphics > performance, usability, stuff like that. GNOME 3, meanwhile, also > focusses heavily on a 'standard' look. And the same there goes for > colors etc. > > We can and should of course have our own wallpaper, GRUB, boot-, > login- and app splashes. Moreover, we could do as we did before > with the Plasma theme - have a subtle variation, replacing the > circles with something more opensuse-y.

I like this too. The more clever branding, the better. I was thinking also that it could be pretty good to try different default widgets, not just the folder one. But something like Weather, RSS or something of the sort. Even a small plasma tutorial to start using openSUSE.

Agreed, the default panel and applet setup is something we could change. Why not do a proposal? A plasma tutorial thing would be awesome but has to be written by someone :D

As I think of this, plasmoid ideas that can be useful would be:

RSS: (feed, opensuse, and newspapers) Folder: (not on the default desktop folder but on the home folder, I have seen that the desktop icons for folder view repeat themselves on the taskbar) Weather: (a small one) Tutorial: This could be a link to youtube videos showing how to use openSUSE, or a small html writeout on how to get started. Desktop Arrows: for easy desktop change. (http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/07/todays-30-minute-hacks.html)

Yeah, these might indeed be useful. The tutorial one needs to be created and that would be quite some work - we'll have to find someone to do it. That might be something for a hack session at the openSUSE conference.

We could also add a microblogging widget, btw.

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Maybe you can propose a hack session for the openSUSE conference to write such a plasmoid. With QML it is easy, we can get Sebas or others to help us with it, teach it or do it after the Plasma/QML workshop Sebas will surely give and ask people there to join the hack session and help us out with their new skills! If we can have a good proposal beforehand we could write it at oSC.

Such a proposal would be nice to make & blog about to get feedback...

Do you think it would be good to create mockups for these?

Sure.

I created a mockup for a simple menu idea. I was thinking creating a few more going from simple to fully featured. Tell me what you think, and you are welcome to edit or ask what these icons mean.

https://cacoo.com/diagrams/Qwmnz9CqLnrTya2r

I think you really go too ambitious here. I'd focus first on what we can accomplish without development. And Plasma is quite flexible so you can get pretty far... In other words, implement a mockup directly in Plasma and if you can't do something, assume we won't get it. Because it is quite a challenge to get someone to implement a feature in C++...

I know it sucks but it's just more realistic to assume we won't get much coding done.

I would also stay as close as possible to familiar setups - the traditional panel with menu bottom-right etc. Make incremental improvements or we loose a large share of our users (as GNOME 3, KDE4 and Unity have shown).

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