I bet nobody expected this (I didn’t) - the next distro-branded version of stripes is for freeBSD. The freeBSD logo is quite pretty, but distorting it ruins it beyound recognition. For this reason, the wallpaper has much less depth than the previous ones.

One is the obligatory blue (not to say vanilla version) and the other one is redish)

KDE be free…

And here’s the first attempt of making a KDE-branded one… I’m not yet satisfied with it, this is only a preview.

So, one of the first distros that contacted me related to branded Stripes was openSuse. So, this is one of the versions.

(there are ~7 in total, including the plain blue like the Debian one was)

Working on modified Stripes turned out to be rather gratifying. I didn’t expect the wallpaper to /work/ with different colours.

It even looks cool when two different colours are used for the background. (maybe I’ll do that for some other distro)

Some time ago, Nuno was talking about us (KDE) modifying/adapting artwork we have to suit distributions so that both KDE and distribution brand can be retained. (if someone has the link to the blog posts in question, I’d be much obliged)

So, without a further ado, the preview version of a Debian-specific version of the Stripes wallpaper:

edit: Multiresolution archive now available on kde-look and via GHNS.

So, if you maintain (or whatever you call it) artwork for your distro, and would like to have a distro-branded version, just send me an e-mail or find me on IRC.

p.s. Why Debian? I’m using it and the swirl looks awesome in Stripes :)

p.p.s. I know marketing people will not like the idea of distorting their logos, but… it looks rather cool! :D

If you haven’t noticed, KDE SC 4.5 comes with a new wallpaper named Stripes. It has replaced the old default_blue that has been our friend since 3.x days (and maybe even earlier, I don’t know).

Since it is used in KDM, it can’t be (yet) shipped with multiple resolutions, but due to its simplicity it scales rather well.

If you are not satisfied with the default resolution (strangely enough it is 1440x900), you can download the multiresolution package from my gallery at deviantArt. Unfortunately, dA doesn’t accept .tar.gz so the wallpapers are zipped.

EDIT: Note that this is not the same version as the one shipped with KDE SC - this one (apart from multiple resolutions) includes a gaussian-noise hack Nuno suggested to make gradients look better.

At last Tokamak (Plasma developer sprint), I’ve made a small KWrite proof-of-concept patch just to see how it will behave with the new activities framework - notifying system when it opens and closes a document. A lot of time has passed since, and activity classes were completely revamped, turned upside-down, went through one API review, and moved from the playground to kdebase/libs.

That original patch doesn’t exist anymore, and even if it did, it wouldn’t work for all the changes that were made to activities.

The uber-awesome KDE conference - aKademy - was a time for something new!

New client

Ok, after this introduction you’d expect that I’ve written another patch for KWrite. Well, you’re wrong. The first application that supports activities as a client is Vim! :)

The main reason I went for Vim this time was to prove that non-kde apps can work with our awesome concept of activities. Another reason is that I didn’t want to use KActivity* classes, so that I can see whether the d-bus protocol is sufficiently profound for this task. It turned out that it is, but there are some improvements to be made.

At the moment, only Vim invoked from a terminal emulator program (eg Konsole) can work with activities since I can’t find a way to retrieve the window id of a GUI-enabled Vim from vimscript, so I’m essentially using WINDOWID environment variable that terminal emulators set.

The following is a debugging output of the activity manager daemon related to Vim windows

resourceWindowRegistered: 54526034 file:///home/ivan/mailacc.txt
resourceWindowUnregistered: 54526034 file:///home/ivan/.vimrc
resourceWindowRegistered: 85983274 file:///home/ivan/
resourceWindowRegistered: 85983274 file:///usr/share/vim/vim72/doc/options.txt

Truly limitless possibilities!!!

^^^^ just wanted to write an awesome marketing-speak sentence for the end of the post :D