Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Intrepid and beyond

Things are winding up for Intrepid. This time, we spent quite some effort on trying out new things. Our dark theme test seemed to pay off. Next time I would announce it better :-) There are quite a few changes coming in Intrepid soon, sounds (hopefully) as well. The ubuntu-sounds package, with new sounds from Mads Rosendahl, ended up being somewhat larger than the previous version and therefor awaits sign-off. You can get all these changes for Ubuntu Intrepid (and some of them for Hardy) in my PPA

Slowly but surely the ubuntu artwork community seems to coalesce. Hardy proved that people can contribute to the process (wallpaper and gtk work, among others). Intrepid is proving that teams can work together and produce amazing results, just look at the community-themes package.

Intrepid specifics are still in flux. There are still quite a few bugs to fix. The wallpaper and gdm are not final, just ideas to test.

I'd also like to take a whack at removing some of the cruft in the available themes. Certainly there are better things to include, theme-wise (gtk and metacity). Getting quite late for this stuff, so the sooner, the better :-) If it was up to me, we would use the dark theme - NewHuman is the working name. It would, perhaps, force people to include dark theme ideas in their plans/code when developing an application.


What's next?

In my mind, Kyūdō. Check the other pages linked at the bottom, there is more info than you think.There are some really good people behind this. Thorsten Wilms is leading the effort with help from Cory Kontros and others. Troy James Sobotka has probably influenced this more than he thinks, I hope he can help in this effort. It is a solid foundation for improvement in the future and can, with lots of hard work, define how things should be done.

At Canonical things are moving forward as well. We're building a team of experts in user experience and visual design which can put ideas into practice and lead the field.

The pieces are coming together...from pure graphic design, platform artwork, platform usability, application usability and prototyping skills to the technical competence necessary to help every team achieve their goals. We can deliver an outstanding user experience across all communications medium.

4 comments:

  1. I'm a bit confused since I spotted this blog entry at dot.kde.org, is your work for kubuntu/kde or ubuntu/gnome?

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  2. Hi,
    I'm wondering, will there be an all new theme from Canonical in addition to the community themes?
    Thanks for the reply!
    Lorenz

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  3. In your article you said you and the other folks at Canonical were building a design team which sounds very very promising. Will this team be creating a new theme post beta for Intrepid as previously announced by Canonical or is the team aiming to begin their work on Ubuntu 9.04. Either way this is very exciting news and I look forward to hearing more! Thanks.

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  4. 1) I work on all *buntu variants (and a lot of other things which you probably don't realize)

    2) no, there will be no new theme for 8.10 other than the dark non-ubuntulooks engine-based default theme (a lot of work in itself which solves quite a few bugs) and the dark theme as well as the community theme package I helped create

    3) Our design team is being formed as we speak. This is the main reason why we will not include a radically new theme in Intrepid as default. Once the team is formed and we know how to move forward in a coordinated effort things will change.

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