Color Challenge

It took up tatica's challenge, and to my own astonishment I scored perfect. I did it in a room, at night with medium bright indirect lighting, on a LCD screen that came with my 6 years old laptop. There where a couple of colours I wasn't 100 % sure of, but it seems I leaned towards the correct choices after a couple of switch-compare-switch-compare rounds. What helped me was that while two colours seemed sometimes almost same, when grouped with other already sorted colours, when they were in wrong order, they stood out.

Nodoka Concept Art—Finished

It's been a year, a month and a day (and a couple of hours) since my last update to Nodoka concept art (well, I've been lazy, busy with other stuff and since vast majority of my apps are still GTK2, there was also no need). Over the weekend I've finished the last one—Noir. The current Nodoka style will remain as Classic. As it will be mostly unchanged (sans maybe some small modifications to shadows) I haven't done any concept art for that. I hope it won't be another year before I start writing code, actually… Anyway, here are the pics (roughly sorted from brightest to darkest), enjoy!

Nodoka Glossy

Nodoka Classic

Nodoka Modern

Nodoka Noir

If the pictures are blurry you can see them in original size on Nodoka 1.x concept art wiki page.

I hope you like it, comments are welcomed. Also bear in mind that this is concept art, not a working example. So the working example will look slightly different and moreover I haven't started writing it yet.

Fedora 18 Alpha Wallpaper

It's rather old news, but today it has been finally set as default—yes the wallpaper for Fedora 18 Spherical Cow release. It took so much time because I didn't manage to update the package that sets the defaults in time before Alpha freeze.

You probably have a general idea of what the wallpaper looks like from my post about pre-alpha version of it, but since then it has been polished a bit—mizmo did a great job on that—and now it looks like this ;-)

Enjoy.

Update Sep 08: I'm not the author of the wallpaper, just a packager, so do not thank me ;-) However, I'm relaying your feedback to the design-team, so I really appreciate all the comments you've posted so far. I'll keep both my readers as well as the design team informed about news on both sides, so comment more and stay tuned for updates ;-)

Midori—Two New Improvements

Those of you who have been following my blog for a long time probably know that for various reasons (to list a few—it's still in gtk2, uses webkit, has tab panel feature, it's fast, has simple, yet powerful UI, uses gstreamer for html5 video …) I'm a user (and fan) of a lightweight xfce web-browser called Midori (it's from Japanese 緑 which means green). For these past few months I've been constantly annoyed by two of it's shortcommings—loading of pages have become slooooow and very CPU intensive; and java plugins crashed the browser upon applet removal (e.g. by reloading or closing the page). Today I've figured fixes for both!

Sluggish page loading—caused by cookie manager

Today I've noticed that the very same pages that are freezing the UI upon load for a few seconds does not suffer from these issues when opened in web-app mode. So my guess was like—either user style/script or plugin fault. A simple try-and-error quickly yielded results. The plugins that is at fault is cookie manager, though I haven't got the slightest idea why. So if you suffer from similar problems, just disable cookie manager and you'll be back to the usual swiftness of webkit based browsers.

Crashing java plugin—fixed in icedtea-web-1.3

Yes, yesterday on Fedora Planet I read the release information about new icedtea-web plugin and since it contained info about google chrome fixes, I guessed it might improve my midori experience as well. However as there was still no build for fedora today morning, I decided to build it myself. So I did (was as easy as downloading the new tarbal and bumping the version in rpm spec file) and to my great joy, java applets now load faster and do not crash upon exit. What a great day!

Fedora 18 Pre-Alpha Wallpaper

It's been a while since I last blogged, but as I have some design news, it's worth writing a blog post again. Yesterday there was another design team meeting&hackfest and we were able to agree on the theme for the Fedora 18 Sperical Cow wallpaper. The latest iteration, I still call it pre-alpha because I expect there'll be some polishing yet before alpha release looks like this:

I've packaged it and submitted a review request, which is currently in need of a reviewer.

We at the design team hope you'll like it and of course are open to comments and suggestions. We'll hear you out in our usual channels: #fedora-design @ irc.freenode.net and Fedora Design Team Mailing List.