Tango Friday

We had a little Tango drawing session during friday. We discussed the best
practices in Inkscape with Garrett, Tuomas and Andreas and we got a few icons
commited. Garrett actually pointed out a functionality I overlooked in
Inkscape. Back in my Illustrator days, I loved the round edges effect
which would apply on any bezier shape. Inkscape has something just as powerful,
linked offset. It creates a linked instance of an object and you can
define the rounding with the node tool. Editing the original shape updates the
offset link copy in real time.

Friday’s Tango pixel pushing was much fun and we’re likely to continue doing
this each friday. So if you’re feeling artsy, drop by at #tango on
irc.freenode.net. And you’re welcome the rest of the week too.

Some people (mainly from KDE camp) suggested adding a visual metaphore
description into the naming spec as it will help to make for example the
documentation easier – one could refer to “the eye dropper” and it should
work in any spec-conforming theme regardless of its visual style.

Also we are quite inclined to get rid of the floppy metaphor for the
save action. It is widely used, but the number of people who never
used them is growing each day

Tango’s starting to shape up on KDE.

Jizerka

Iva managed to wake me up from hibernation on saturday morning to go do some
photo shoot back in Jizerka.

The waking up part sucked just like in Vermont,
but otherwise it was very cool.

It’s not as bad as it used to, but getting a fairly recent printer to work
in Linux is still not an easy task. Without google, and a gentoo wiki in this
case, I’d be still pulling my hair trying to set up my dad’s printer.

So to the lucky ones having this network color printer, don’t bother
wrestling with IPP or lpd. What works 100% in color is the provided driver/ppd
and hp jetdirect (socket://yourprinter:9100).

Compile the driver
as the foo2zjs appears to be monochrome only. You will need jbig-kit which doesn’t seem
to be available in ubuntu. Once this is installed, you will be able to pick the
“standard” 2430 ppd from the KONICA-MINOLTA section. Select HP Jetdirect as the
protocol and add your printer hostname/IP and the default 9100 port. If you try
the IPP or LPD method, it will appear to be working but ocasionally pause the
queue complaining about client unsupported document or something.

Of course it’s tough to finish my fight with cups with a “See dad? Linux is
not that hard”. But we’re getting there

Here comes another cool app of the week, even though not exactly fresh news . I’ve grown to love the Muine
Jukebox. Unlike do-it-all music managers such as iTunes, Rhythmbox or Banshee, Muine
concentrates to do one task really good – play back the music on your
computer. The whole interface is centered around a playlist. At any given time
you have a clear indication of what is being played and what will follow.

Jorn really nailed it with the way you add albums to individual tracks to
the playlist. Filterable flat list like that would rock for gimp filters as
well. Initially I was skeptical about the missing controls for seeking. In
the end though, it’s more of a problem of missing cuesheets for mixed sets from
hybridized rather than poor design (how often do
you seek on your CD player?). Next and previous track should be enough in most
cases (you can still Ctrl+arrow to seek).

If you feel like picking albums to listen to is much of a task (like me ,
make use of the awesome audioscrobbler with a tracker and
playlist
creating plugins. Finally something simpler than Xmms, yay!

Vincent, I
sort of felt the Photobooth app being useless as well and Steve has only
shown it to brag about the ingenuity of his designers comming up with using
the LCD backlight as a flash. But the tiny app becomes real useful as soon as
it’s integrated into the system. And I’m sure it will. Setting up your IM
avatar (that’s also used in the system login, much like Ubunutu’s About
Me) would simply link to launch this little toy. And suddenly it’s not so
useless.

Rodney, our release guru, has put up the 0.3.1 release of Tango (you want icon-naming-utilities too). Thanks to the support of the growing community, we are working better on KDE now. The configure script provides a switch to generate the bitmaps for other sizes on KDE (--enable-png-creation). Similarly, the 24×24 creation is controlled by --disable-icon-framing. There’s also a few new additions from Andreas Nilsson. Other fixes include fixing up metadata to list the prope CC share alike license and fixes in the legacy mapping file.

Shaun, Dave,
heh that’s kinda like all the motherboard manuals. But on a more serious note
it would rock if help pages could have a “show me” button taking control of an
application and showing a task on a running instance.