Category Archives: Planet KDE

Icon Time: High Definition Oxygen and Nuvola

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High Definition Oxygen

Without any doubt Tokamak II was a great meeting, as it allowed me to work on several things. Two of these things are High Definition Oxygen icons and Nuvola icons.

High Definition Oxygen is a folder that contains 256×256 icons for mimetypes and places and the really good news is that now Oxygen iconset uses less space on disk than before: we don’t install SVGs anymore (so we can save about 60 mb) and we can use a piece of that free space for the new high definition icons that are incredibly small (they requires only a couple of mb).

Something that I really liked about Oxygen is that it is already ready to render at big sizes (Oxygen artists have done a great work).

I have also great news for Nuvola icon set fans: Nuvola is back and it will be part of KDE 4.3 kdeartwork module 🙂
During tokamak I spent several hours renaming and fixing Nuvola icon names and now it can be used also on KDE 4 🙂

10 rules for a plasma widgets developer

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  1. Don’t call updateGeometry() during a size constraintsEvent and don’t call resize.
    If you want to keep the same aspect ratio you may be interested in Applet::setAspectRatioMode( ).
  2. If you want to write a new clock widget, you should inherit from libplasmaclock ClockApplet.
  3. Don’t do custom things: use default plasma methods and widgets when possible.
    Some useful methods are: Applet::setBusy( ) if your applet is busy, Applet::setConfigurationRequired( ) if user needs to configure the widget, etc…
    Some useful widgets are: Plasma::CheckBox, Plasma::ComboBox, Plasma::LineEdit, Plasma::PushButton, Plasma::RadioButton, etc…
  4. Don’t reimplement Applet::showConfigurationInterface, reimplement Applet::createConfigurationInterface instead.

    void MyApplet:createConfigurationInterface(KConfigDialog *parent)
    {
    QWidget *widget = new QWidget();
    ui.setupUi(widget); //ui is your configuration interface
    parent->addPage(widget, i18n("General"), icon());
    connect(parent, SIGNAL(applyClicked()), this, SLOT(configAccepted()));
    connect(parent, SIGNAL(okClicked()), this, SLOT(configAccepted()));
    }
  5. Use Plasma::Animator and fast animations (not slower than 150 milliseconds).
  6. Use a standard background when possible.
  7. Avoid installing custom svg graphics when possible.
  8. Load graphics using Plasma::Svg.
  9. Don’t forget that the theme may change while your widget is running.
  10. paintInterface() might be called before init().

Camp KDE (Day 6)

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Camp KDE (Day 5)

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Camp KDE (Day 4)

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Camp KDE (Day 3)

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Thanks to Adrian and to The French Guy for making cookies 😀

Camp KDE :D

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Camp KDE is great! 😀

changes in kdeartwork

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Everything in KDE 4 looks fresh and cool but kdeartwork is the same since KDE 3 so recently I’ve started to work on a kdeartwork update.

As first step I’ve done 3 big changes to kdeartwork:

  • Moved desktoptheme to kdeartwork.
  • Some kdebase wallpapers have been moved to kdeartwork (kdebase doesn’t contain more than 15 wallpapers).
  • Some old artworks have been killed (or moved to a different location).

Actually I’m still working on kdeartwork clean up, but soon as possible, when I finish this step, I’ll blog more about the future of kdeartwork.

I'm Going To Camp KDE