spent time yesterday plugging a few more problems in kde3's kicker. both were my own making so i deserved it ;) one issue was positioning of centered panels when there was a panel on an adjacent side of the screen, the other had to do with the system tray spasming due to the layout resizing the tray in unexpected ways when it was put into certain configurations, such as a 49px wide vertical panel. i moved to a qlayout for the tray in 3.5 specifically to remedy other geometry problems but it introduced some new subtle issues. the internal complexity of kicker is a real pain. and watching it call resizing and layout function for each and every applet 4, 5, 6 or more times in a row just makes me cringe. oh well ...
i also realized yesterday that i hadn't received my tickets for my flight to akademy. so i went to the website i bought them on (travelocity, if anyone cares) and the itinerary was there and said it was all good. so i phoned to find out what had happened, assuming the tickets simply had been misrouted. turns out my reservation had been cancelled. lovely. two hours later i have a new reservation that's nearly the same price i booked for originally on a better carrier. it wasn't easy to beat it into their callcenter staff that selling me a ticket they couldn't provide and then not updating the itinerary on the website was something they should take some responsibility for. *sigh*
and then i upgraded the stable kde on the laptop from the kubuntu repos and wow ... lots of little regressions. amarok crapped out a few times before finding its feet and boy are those new icons not so great. but more on that in a bit. i had problems with fonts, kontact and more after the upgrade ... seems apt-get got wedged and was admant on "holding back" certain packages. with a little encouragement via adept it all went in, but this was harder than i've come to expect. which says a lot about how slick things are these days in general because a few years ago i would've been happy if that's how easy it was ;)
the sky2 driver is still broken, though. yay for that. and ipw2200 occasional loses its mind too. loverly. both known problems.
more on the amarok icons: they have a number of aesthetic and quality issues. not something i'd put as the default myself, and not just because breaking consistency like that is a fairly braindamaged thing to do. but i can see why they did it: many of the new icons are more consistent with each other, clearer in meaning (a great example is to compare "equalizer" from crystal and "equalizer" in amarok's set) and give the app much less of a "dancing rainbow of colours" look that one gets right now with crystal's myriad of colours. and it's not that the crystal icons are individually bad (generally they are higher quality than what i see in amarok's set, to be honest) but together as a collection of icons they really fall down. (btw, i really like the new "playing song" animation in the playlist; it's just that much nicer now)
all of these are things that oxygen is addressing: clearer meaning, non-busy (both colour and shape complexity) action icons, clarity between the icons as a set, etc.. so i hope that in kde4 amarok can drop their own icon set and use oxygen instead. i really think amarok can get what they need out of oxygen without resorting to the broken approach of having their own miniset. and if they really must, then fall back to a set of oxygen-y icons packaged with amarok if oxygen isn't the icon set used.
anyways ... the last few days have been a bit on the annoying side leading up to akademy. which sort of describes the last several weeks, too. things that have time pressure or community pressure keep coming up and landing at my feet and so i have to prioritize those items. what is nice is that there are more people stepping up again to do various things. i wonder if this is a summertime issue?
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11 comments:
Regarding the amarok icons:
An ideal situation for an artist is that the main icon set has a style guide that is spelled out like the tango project did it. Both Oxygen and Tango provide a colour pallet, but Oxygen has yet to give out a clear cut, detailed style guideline document (at least, not that I know about).
Crystal, meanwhile, doesn't appear to have much of either available to third party artists; which is probably why consistency between KDE and third party applications is taking a hit.
Hopefully, detailed Oxygen guidelines will be published soon. That would give applications that _must_ have their own icons time to create Oxygen consistent icons before KDE4 hits the masses.
And, like you said, Oxygen is a high quality set, so it's likely that it will lessen the number of applications that need to use their own icons, which will also improve consistency on the desktop.
Yeah, the icons aren't so crash hot. Unfortunately it seems that all artists seem to go AWOL leaving a half completed set.
After a lot of debating, i'd like to see there be a set of KDE media icons, eg, media_podcast.png, so that any icon producer can (and would) overload them.
Although icon developers can overload the icons now, it is a little more difficult than it should be.
Oh, one more thing!
Just to illustrate the point that there is generally an icon problem:
- the crystal equaliser icon is actually the aRts visualisation icon which i had to import into the sources.
A *lot* of the KDE icons are actually part of kdebase, and not kdelibs - since we don't depend on kdebase, users which have non-kde window managers often find themselves with "that-blank-white-icon" problem...
@seb: are you at akademy this year?
i've actually cataloged every icon in kde some months ago in a database. really crazy how much duplication there is.
in the "media/music" category there are 40 icons, including the two you mention (art's ffscope icon and amarok's visualization icon)
duplication, both wholesale and compositionally, are problems.
one of the things that art team are working on at akademy is assembling a list of needed icons. i'll look at the ones in the current amarok and see what's there.
Aaron: Unfortunately I won't be able to be at akademy... a combination of money, thesis work and living on the opposite side of the world. :P.
It would still be great to be able to help out with that list of icons, or provide some feedback etc.
The game is called 'whack a mole' in case you really want to get technical!
Jaye
The other issue with using KDE icons is that its not at all obvious which icons are bundled with kdelibs and which aren't. I saw default Amarok 1.3 on my flatmates Debian computer and it looked like crap, because of all the blank icons. So bundling all the icons is pretty much a necesity.
But yea, no reason to not bundle the Oxygen icons.
Ok, I now see Seb already addressed the issue. :)
Hi Aaron!
Apt-get, while being a good tool, IMO doesn't have the brains that aptitude has.
I mean, aptitude's dependency resolution 'tricks' are far more evolved than apt-get one's.
That's why it became debian's standard installer from sarge and on.
Also, apt-get trying to 'hold back' some packages may be because you were using "# apt-get upgrade" instead of "#apt-get dist-upgrade";
The later option (both in apt-get and aptitude) goes deeper in the dependency-tree to install newer versions of dependencies and the program itself.
If you didn't got a thing of what i said :), here's a better explanation of it:
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ch-package.en.html
--
YUP!
have you tried booting with "irqpoll"?
Well, should moi record a parody of "Born In The U.S.A"
("Born Pullin' On My Pud")
or
"The Times They Are A-Changing"
("The Times They Ain't A-Changin'")
?
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