Random pixels

Drawn with wacom tablet and the amazing MyPaint!

Everyone who signs up for a a monthly Friends of GNOME donation receive a postcard from a GNOME hacker as a thank you. We found the regular, touristy postcards a bit boring, so we decided to create some ourselves, based on motives by four GNOME artists.

They are drawn by Kalle Persson, Vinicius Depizzol, Máirín Duffy and myself (Andreas Nilsson).

So if you would like one of these, sign up to be a monhtly donor!

Once you’re done with that, you can encourage others to donate by putting one of these badges on your blog or website.

I wonder if some of this could give us more of this.

Are you a artist who feel like contributing a couple of pixels to the GNOME project, but don’t know where to start?
Here are ten open issues that need your help today:

• Mockups for expanders
• Icons for new widgets in Glade
• New icons for cpufreq applet
• Icons for GNOME DVB Daemon
• Few Mud Icons for Gnome-Mud
• Logo and icon for Python RevEditor
• Improved icons for Psppire
• Logo for Rygel
• Generic icons for audio device form factors: Headsets, Headphones, ext. Speakers
• Logo and icons for Déjà Dup, a backup program

Been working on the appearance of Thunderbird for the last two months now and as things are starting to land in the Nightly builds, things are indeed starting to look quite nice. As always, Lapo have been of great help in the icon department.

I’ve always enjoyed Thunderbird and it’s predecessors that have been following me since I started out with web stuff when I was around 14 years old. Therefore, working on this would really scratch my own itch as I felt it always looked out of place on my Linux desktop and allow me to give back to the e-mail client that served me with so many messages over the years (and pay the rent, yay!).

Anyway, here are some shots:

Main window:

Compose:

Address book:

As you might note, the icons in the main toolbar pretty much look the same, this is mainly because they are going away as soon as the great work that’s been going on with the new toolbar layout lands.

As we’ve used GTK+ stock items wherever we can, your folders in the sidebar will of course look native. Comparison between regular GNOME, Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu:

Please check out a Nightly build and report any issues.

Cool, it appears MadsRH took my work and remixed it.
Next step, take his work and remix it for the GNOME 3.0 schedule!

Glad to see the new Friends of GNOME website finally online.
Kalle and I started with this when he and Clemens was over at my place some time ago.

We started with ideas and sketches. We tried a couple of different approaches and ideas for the selection of the donation level and a bunch of different ways of displaying the page where you select your hacker and different illustrations.

Then we took the best sketches and imported those into Inkscape for selecting the best colors, choosing the exact styling of the elements and made sure the text that Stormy provided us with would fit etc.

The last step was the actual html+php+css+jquery voodoo. I spent quite some time battling php (I didn’t really know any php before) to allow the page to display different things on the second page, depending on your choice on the first page and trying to understand how paypal worked exactly. Kalle fixed some jQuery and made sure my broken php snippets would work properly. Collaborating over Dropbox worked pretty well actually.

I also made a banner that all GNOME fans can put on their websites or blogs and link to http://www.gnome.org/friends.

Someone also asked if I could make a general GNOME Lover banner too, so here is that as well.

Did a attempt to create a graphical representation of the GNOME Release Process, as requested here.

bigger version | source

The birds turned out pretty neat I guess, or as Vincent said:

I like it. It’s pure art, you know. Not understandable.

Myself, Carlos and Hagen attended FSCons (Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit) this weekend and on Sunday I did a talk on the Tango Project.

As we all know by now, “The Tango Project is nothing less than an attempt to impose Gnome’s bland aesthetics on all other desktop environments.” [1], and the KDE artists decided to define their own look and feel as part of their visual refresh for KDE4.
This, at the time made me a bit worried, as having the other big desktop not buying into the idea of a cross-desktop look and feel makes things slightly harder for your friend the application developer to the point where he almost decides not to do any visual integration to with your free desktop at all.

Looking at the recent work on the smaller sizes on Oxygen and the work on bigger sizes in Tango, it turns out that perhaps my worries was for no reason though. [2]

So, I showed this to my girlfried. It turns out she couldn’t spot the difference between the styles. But ok, fair enough, she’s not used to looking and these, and might not spot the important differences. But what about the audience at my talk, who are used to staring at these graphical elements all day long?
Sorry guys, it turns out they guessed wrong in about 50% of the cases. Good news for ISV/ISD’s though I guess!

1. From the old “throw this stuff out now please”-thread on freedesktop.org
2. To be honest, sneaky as we are, we have been working on lowering the gaps between the styles. Sorry for that.