Following the proposal on the Ubuntu Art mailing list, I decided to create a little mockup of what I think the new Ubuntu Icon Theme (aka Human) should look like.

As you can see it mostly uses the Tango-Styling-Guideline, with a little bit of extra gloss. I also used some colors from the Tango color palette, but modified it so it has a more brown-sand-like look.

The main focus of this theme is, to create a modern, elegant icon theme that fits well into the Gnome desktop.

A few tests to see how the icons work in different sizes:

If you have some feedback or suggestions, just drop me a comment.

As response to the feedback you gave me in the comments, I updated the table. I also added some short descriptions to each profile.

Is it just me or did the last few weeks just pass like *that*? Strange how fast time can flow… Anyway.

Today I took some time to think about better values / names for the profiles provided in Simple-CCSM.  And that is what I could come up with: Five profiles, one using default setting, two using Wall and two using Cube.

Here is a table which shows the exact settings in each profile:

Any suggestions on these?

BTW. I’m on vacation next week, so I won’t be available.

As you might have noticed, Simple-CCSM has changed a lot since my last blog post. Sorry for not keeping you up to date. I admit, I was a little bit too lazy to blog.

First of all, the interface. Well thanks to Mirco “MacSlow” Müller, who pointed me into the right direction, the UI now looks much more Gnome like.

The zoom page (aka accessibility page) was a little bit extended. You are now also able to configure ‘mag’ (aka area zoom).

There is now also an option for enabling ‘expo’ on the effects page.

Probably one of the most wanted change should be the global screen edge widget. At least I enjoy it not needing to start CCSM and searching my way through the settings for changing a few edge key bindings. Sadly this widget might have slowed the Simple-CCSM startup a bit down.

In order to clean my TO DO list up even further, I would like to get some suggestions for the profiles Simple-CCSM should provide. What profiles would you like to have? What should be activated, what disabled? Any suggestions for their names?

You can comment here or just send me an email to marex a_t opencompositing d_o_t org.

Today, I want to introduce Kiba Dock to you. No, I don’t mean that ancient version with the neat physics effects, I mean the full grow dock. I have been using Kiba Dock for some time now, not always as default. Kiba Dock had some serious stabitility problems in the past. Which might be a reason why it has not as many users as Avant-Window-Navigator (who did come up with that name anyway?!) .

But recently Kiba Dock has improved a lot. It’s mostly stable and looks very nice. It has all that little neat animations that makes it look more complete than AWN. It just feels and behaves a lot better. It just works smoothly.

But talk is cheap, so I’ll show you some of it’s features:

Stacks

Yes, this one is nothing new. I know. But I really like the implementation in Kiba Dock. Really handy to keep your presentation files ready, or do some kind of “files to process” folder. Try it out, I’m sure you can find various usages for it.

Starters

Yeah, standard. But still, it is implemented pretty good.

Configuration

Kiba is configurable. I mean really configurable and not like ‘tweaking 5 basic options’. That’s something I really like.

I wish I could show of some animations, but I feat screen capturing won’t work you that good here.

Many thanks to Daniel “danielb” Beßler for developing this great dock. Keep up the good work!

You can grab it via svn here:

svn co https://kibadock.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/kibadock kibadock

Today, I bought, unusual enough, music. No, I didn’t buy a CD and rip it, I bought the files online. In FLAC (Loss-less codec). Without DRM. Paid and completely downloaded in less than an hour. 36 songs and some really cool wallpapers. For $5 (read: 3.28€). That are 9 Cents per song.

Yes, I am talking about Ghosts I-IV from Nine Inch Nails. Besides being a great NIN fan, I really had to support this project from Trent Reznor. I really hope other musician will notice, and maybe change the way they “promote” their music through their labels.

And yeah btw. the music itself is really nice as well. It has this typical dark melodic (sometimes even a little disturbing) sound, which most NIN songs have. I love it.

Just a little status report about what I’ve been up to since my last blog post.

Since school started again, I didn’t have too much time recently. Most of that little time went into CCSM.

The first thing I put a little work in was the advanced search, which is one of the rather messy code parts of CCSM. Let me first point out the obvious visual improvements. As you can see in the screenshot below, icons were added to the plugin list and it is now more obvious which plugin are enabled and which aren’t.

It is now also possible to display all plugin settings at once, especially useful if there are only a few settings found.

Under the hood I *tried* to clean up the code and make it faster, which was only partly successful. Maybe a treeview, as Christopher Williams suggested, would be the answer.

Speaking of messy code, I also worked a bit on the MultiList settings, which now also support colors. For that purpose I had to code CellRenderer for RGBA colors first. Actually that was easier then I thought, thanks to the pyGTK reference, google and koders. The result can be seen below. Feel free to c’n'p it out of Widgets.py when you need something like this in your own application.

Today’s song is a little bit different than the last few I presented here. In general I enjoy eletronic music from time to time, but this song really got into my ear. It’s called “Ready For The Floor” by Hot Chip from their latest Album called “Made in the Dark”. It has a nice beat and the melody is quiet catchy. You can perfectly listen to it while coding.

If you liked the song, there are also some other videos from Hot Chip on YouTube.

Huh I always mix up that year dates, dunno why. Might be because of the ongoing cuttings on civil rights in Germany. With a data retention law monitoring my communication I definitely feel a lot safer.

Anyway. Looking back, 2007 was one of the most intense years in my life. Many changes and many new experiences. But I’m confident 2008 can catch up with that.

I had some time working on Simple-CCSM during my holidays and I actually used it.

First of all the CCSM code has gone through a review and was cleaned up a lot. The code corresponding to each page is now put into its own class. The signal system is moved to the glade file, which really saves a lot of unneeded code. Some nasty bugs were also squashed such as the wrong size of desktop preview widget.

I finished my work on the Zoom page: well, ok still looking a bit empty.

There is also new an effects page. It allows you to select your favorite switcher and enable some nice plugins like scale, wobbly and blur.

You might have noticed the “Advanced” button. It launches CCSM depending on your currently selected page in the notebook. For example, clicking on it while your are configuring animations it will launch CCSM with the animation plugin settings. Quite handy if you want to give your settings a little bit extra tweaking.

Wuhu. Two weeks of holidays after two months of stress.

Now, that I have some time, I can work on simple-ccsm again. It’s really so relaxing drinking a cup of coffee and hack a bit on simple-ccsm.

Because I don’t want to bore you too much with my personal stuff, here is what I’ve been working on lately.

First of all, the UI got some redesign. Looks a little bit more like other GNOME dialogs. Profiles are now selected with a ComboBox, the slider was just unusable with slower machines. As you can see, there is also a description field now. That should give the user a better idea of what the profile really is about.

I’m currently also working on an own page for Zoom, to configure basic settings.

The only annoying thing at the moment is the profile switching. It just acts weird. I have to take a closer look into the CCS internals to find out what causes that “weirdness”.