Wallpaper Challenge - winners

In which we go through the winners of the wallpaper competition, talk about voting issues and where we go from here

Nuno's wallpaper the default wallpaper for Plasma 5

The Heat is on! 

Right it's getting closer and closer to the D-day of Plasma and things are getting hectic. All of us are wild at work and things are getting cooler and cooler. But the wallpaper competition is at least finished and done with for this release which is nice :)

None of this could have happened without the help of Sogatori who has been a prince in shining armor and earned enough good Karma to last a lifetime as far as I'm concerned.

Sogatori Speaks! (below is written by S)

After two weeks and almost 1400 casted votes we’re finally ready to announce the 3 winning wallpaper submissions:

Congratulations also to the 3 winning artists namely orbmiser, ivan and mck182 who is the third runner-up, all of whom can look forward to receiving a copy of the excellent book “Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual” by Timothy Samara. We’ll contact the winners shortly so they receive their prices as quickly as possible.

Some Small Hiccups

Those of you who have kept an eye on the election might have noticed that the website we were using displayed a different result than the one we’re presenting here. The problem was that Sogatori clicked the wrong checkbox when he created the election, the website was using proportional representation to determine the winners instead of a non-proportional one. It is not possible to change this option after the election process has started and at the time we noticed the mistake there had already been over 500 casted votes, so we decided against opening a new election. Instead, we were able to download the data from the website and re-run the election locally using the same software as the website. Special thanks to bshah (Bhushan Shah) who helped us despite having much to do with his GSoC project. A big thumbs up please! 

Wallpapers! Vote for your favorite!

This post was written by Sogatori who has been a rock during this process. I want, before we continue to just have a massive High Five and "You rock!" sent to Sogatori for being such a stand-up dude during this entire process. 

The Wallpaper Contest!

We’re glad to announce that the contest has been a success with over 50 submitted wallpapers.

After the submission phase closed on June 6th, a jury of 3 (1 VDG member, 1 forum member and 1 plasma developer) selected their favourite wallpapers.

The submissions ranged from photographs to artwork. Those who want to take a look at all the submissions that didn’t make it into the finale can do so by looking at our deviantart group and this forum thread. It was no easy task to select the wallpapers for the finale, considering how many great submissions we received. We would like to take the chance again to thank everyone who has taken part in this contest. You are the people who make the KDE community what it is. It’s a pleasure to work with you all.

Now though it is time to move on to the next phase of the plan: The greater KDE community now has the chance to vote for their 3 favourite wallpapers out of the 15 nominees. The winning wallpapers will be shipped with the first release of Plasma Next. Additionally the creators of those 3 wallpapers will receive a copy of the book “Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual” by Timothy Samara, an excellent introduction to the basics of the world of design.

You can vote here. Simply rate the individual wallpapers on a basis of 1 to 5 stars, where 1 star is the worst and 5 stars the best rating, and submit your ballot by clicking the “submit ballot” button at the bottom.

The vote will end 2 weeks after this blogpost has been published.


(Jens Addendum: ok so if you want to talk about the wallpapers and not just vote - please do so in the community thread! The more talky-talky the better! Also, IF by chance on person gets two of the three highest votes one book will go to Number Four on the list (because what are you going to do with TWO books? Better to spread the love around)

"Monday Report" - bi-weekly edition

In which I complain about having too much to do, then start going all insane about all the cool stuff you so need to see, ask you to test the Plasma 5 beta2 and then on to the wallpaper competition and the last leg of that.

Right first off - I am swamped. I know it's not good that I skip the monday reports but lets just say I had to cut down or something or skip sleep entirely... sry guys, I know reports are relevant, but not as relevant as "working on Plasma Next and Next-next" (yes there is a Next-next in the works :) ) so I hope you forgive my tardiness.

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Right on to the awesome stuff. The screenshots are all from Sebastian "Il Capitano" Kügler who is hacking away like his life depended on it. These are all "where we are now" - and check below for "where we're heading" hints.

This is the new login screen - there are plenty of fiddly bits to deal with but it's the first step towards making a unified login experience. Yes the work is still far from over but it's getting closer every day.

 

 So you've logged in have you? Well this is what you'll meet all the system tray icons have been reworked the new Plasma Theme "Breeze" is there and you can see the new wallpaper switcher as well as the new layout for the Application Launcher. Please note that Breeze is transparent - only that its transparent with some dark magic by Marco Martin making the background fuzzy and desaturated.

 

Below is the new battery and brightness tray in the systray. Notice that there are two screenshots, one with the layout as is and one with the new icons. The icon sizes will be fiddled with but when have I ever NOT shown you guys and girls some work-in-progress love?

 

 

So the switcher has gotten some revamped workings too based on the Activity Switcher by Ivan Čukić to try to make the entire feel of the switching a tad bit more unified and safe for users.

 

 

 Below is a pop-up for a new message - now granted not much of a change BUT the work is being done on the layout of the thing. Essentially the Icons size in comparison with the Header and the subheader.

Here's the new Networks Systemtray dohickey - you look me in the eye and tell me that isn't the most awesome thing you've ever seen! As you can see a MASSIVE part of the work has gone into trying to make Plasma feel more unified in its design, trying to make it part of an entire whole instead of different details. The work is far from over but you gotta admit, this is nerve-tinglingly (should be a word) good!

The calendar... Now now before you go all bananas and think "Where's my daily planner bit!?!" the reason it's disabled is because we don't have support for it in PIM just yet. So better disable it by default than bring something that doesn't work amirite?

Also note the Breeze windowdeco. It's there now :)

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Where can I get my greasy mitts on all this magical goodness you ask? Well young madams and sirs you can download and test the Beta 2 of it following the instructions of Jonathan Riddell on the Dot remember that this is for testing only. And please please please write in bugreports and test it thoroughly the better its tested the easier the work becomes!

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Wallpapers! What about the wallpapers? Well the competition is at its final stage. But hey I'll post ANOTHER blogg post in a few seconds ok? It'll be easier for you guys.

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Oh oh oh before I go any further I will whisper to you all a secret... "The system settings are being worked on and although its to early to show anything... lets just say when I saw the current version of them I went "ooooh daaaaaaaamn!" so loud my husband asked what was up" ... I cannot explain how brilliant this will be... ooooh! :D:D:D

Ok I gotta dash, have insane amounts of work to get to and I'll try to do these things properly each week but IF I don't rest assure that the only thing stopping me is because I'm working on something brilliant!