A wild "monday" report appears …

Arguably our insanely-coolest member, Philipp Stefan contributed this "monday" report.

Yes, it has been some time since the last entry, but with the Plasma 5 release and Jens’ busy work schedule there hasn’t been much time for him to write one, unfortunately. I hope I can keep you up to date more regularly from now on. So let’s dive right in:

What’s being worked on

The work on revisiting and expanding the Human Interface Guideline on tooltips has begun. If there’s something that has always bothered you about how tooltips in KDE Applications and Plasma look and feel consider to join in. The work is still in its early stages, so now would be the best time to voice your concerns. [https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=285&t=121892]

Martin Gräßlin has started to work on a new window decoration API for KWin and is also working to port the Breeze window decoration to C++. This should bring the necessary performance boost to make Breeze the default window theme in future releases. We can also expect one feature many love in Oxygen to be present in the new Breeze implementation: window tabs. The awesome community member EraX has stepped up and made some mockups of how window tabs could look like in Breeze.

If you have other ideas and feedback, consider to chime in!

Additionally Martin has created some tasks you can take up to help us out porting Breeze to C++. Take a look at Martin’s blog post for more information [http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/07/kdecoration2-the-road-ahead/]

Behind the scenes Jens Reuteberg and Heiko Tietze has started to collect information for animation guidelines. If you have an expertise in this area or are just generally interested and want to help us out try to contact them. [https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=285&t=121993]

We migrated to KDE’s new todo-board infrastructure, todo.kde.org. It’s really nice having everything consolidated in one place and accessible with one’s KDE-Identity account. In future we also hope to migrate away from Google Docs and Hangouts. We have been looking into something like an OwnCloud installation to create, share and store documents. Nothing is written in stone though and frankly we’ve got more important things to do right now.  

What has been overlooked

We have noticed that the participation rate in the VDG forums has plummeted and only a small core has remained, which are doing awesome work! It has to be expected that participation rates decline at the end of every release cycle, when all the work gets finalized there’s not much to be discussed after all. Nethertheless, we’d like to recreate the same experience we had with the KMyMoney, the window decoration, the widget and the cursor theme.

We identified several causes that could have contributed to the decline in participation:

• Back then the VDG forum was new – people simply got disinterested over time
• The VDG hasn’t communicated as much as in the beginning – the process became less transparent
• There has not been as much guidance in where to start helping out as in the beginning

We try to address these issue better from now on. We have reorganized ourselves a bit, so you can expect more blog entries from more VDG members in future. We also intend to open new “challenges” (not in the sense of a contest) at the beginning of each release cycle where the community can participate in.

Please tell us if you have ideas how we can foster a more vibrant design community in KDE, critique happily appreciated.

We also have a thread in the forums about a related issue. If you feel the same way consider to leave a comment.

Overall I can only encourage you to browse the VDG forum. There are many interesting threads that could need some community love.