This is a post from the Dot, I’m just copying the announcement here as well. So, if you would like to comment, just do it there please.

The KDE Plasma team is inviting everyone to participate in a contest to create Plasma themes from which a select few will be chosen to be included as a part of the upcoming KDE 4.1 release. This is a great opportunity to contribute to a very visible component of the KDE project, the Plasma desktop.

A great feature of Plasma is the ability to theme components of the desktop using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs). This means there is no need for you to know C++ or any other programming language to create a great looking theme.

You only need to know how to use one of many graphics tools (e.g. Krita, Inkscape, The GIMP, Karbon, etc.) and that is all. Depending on your prowess with such tools, you can create great looking plasma themes in as little as an hour.

You can find a quick guide to creating Plasma themes in the Creating a Plasma Theme in 7 Easy Steps Techbase article.

Rules:

1. Submit your work in the Plasma Themes section of KDE-Look.org website. Put a notice ‘(for theme contest)’ in the title of the theme.
2. Submissions will be accepted as a tar.gz file of the theme folder.
3. Submission deadline is 9th April, 2008 18:00 UTC. Themes submitted after the deadline will not be considered for this release.
4. Winners will be announced by 18th April, 2008.
5. All artwork must be original or otherwise meet the requirements for distribution as part of a GPL licensed project. Preferred license is LGPL.

Guidelines:

1. Consistency. All theme parts should fit nicely with each other.
2. Completeness. Although Plasma automatically loads required images from the default theme when they are not present in the active theme, it is suggested that you include SVGs for all theme elements.
3. Uniqueness. The unique always stand out in the crowd; so should your theme.

Have fun! The Plasma Team.

This is a post from the Dot, I’m just copying the announcement here as well. So, if you would like to comment, just do it there please.

First of all, Lancelot can be resized from now on. Just like any other window - drag any edge or corner, and you’ll change it’s size.

But that is not the main reason behind my blogging about this. Since Lancelot /is/ a ground for experiments, here’s another one.

Instead of just changing the mouse cursor when you reach one of the edges to one of the resize cursors, you get a more notifiable feedback - the color of the border changes as well. Since a screenshot is worth hundred lines of code… here it is:

The highlight will be themable.

Well, the ACID3 test is out, and it’s time to see the state of the current browsers on ‘the market’

Follows a list of browsers and their results taken from http://web-graphics.com/2008/03/03/the-acid3-test/, with one addition - Konqueror was not tested there.

Edit: Added a couple more tests - thanks for all who contributed

As you can see, amongst stable versions (in bold), Konqueror beats them all. Hip, hip, hooray for Konqueror (KHTML) devs! And one hip and hooray for WebKit!

Well, as always, when I get bored, something good comes out of it.

This time I was annoyed with the fact that if I wanted to change the layout of Lancelot, I would have to dig in the code and switch layouts, parents, children etc. Without doubt, Lancelot is currently the most complicated (UI-wise) application based on libPlasma. (I’m not taking into consideration Amarok2 since it has only one part of its UI based on plasma - just the center piece - which is trivial ATM)

So I decided it was the time to switch to a XML-based definition of the UI. The problem, of course, was that there is no such feature in Plasma yet - there is a Designer and UIC for QWidgets, but not for Plasma and QGraphicsView

So, what could I do? The answer was simple - write PUIC - Plasma UI Compiler - which takes a XML formated file and generates C++ code from it. The tool is under heavy development meaning that most of current Plasma widgets are not yet supported (read: none of the Plasma’s widgets are supported :) ). Currently, it supports a couple of layouts (Border, Node and Flip) and Lancelot’s widgets.

Since PUIC is the integral part of Lancelot (for the time being), or to be more precise, the integral part of Lancelot’s build system (basic CMake support for PUIC is done also), the first thing on my TODO list is to complete the transition to XML-based UI, thus completing the support for all Lancelot’s widgets. After that, PUIC will be separated to grow on its own, and other layouts will be added with all Plasma’s widgets.

p.s. I have removed Lancelot from extragear’s build until this is finished. p.p.s. Sorry for extremely long sentences. p.p.p.s. No screenshots this time… be patient…

Just to show that there /is/ something happening with Lancelot, here is the new configuration interface for the Lancelot applet (just for the launching applet - not the application itself)

The applet is mostly finished (feature-wise).

It can be vertical (if in a vertical panel) or horizontal (default - on desktop or horizontal panel). It now scales as it should so you will not get it taking 50% of your panel…

The icon can be customized (unlike the current menus in 4.0 - both use KDE logo as icon)…

There still are a few glitches - or to say crashes :) - while applying the configuration on a working applet, but that will be fixed soon.