Fedora 14 Beta Artwork Goodies

Fedora 14 Laughlin Beta release is approaching at an amazing speed and so does the Fedora Design Team work on the release artwork. Just before the freeze we got an updated package with the latest and greatest iteration of the default wallpaper and with 15 supplemental wallpapers in. Here's a preview of what the beta wallpaper looks like:


This isn't a final iteration and we're looking for your feedback! Do you think it's awesome? Or not? Do you think that there are some problems? Do you have suggestions for improvements? Don't hesitate to contact us! If you leave a comment here I'll forward it to the design team, but you can also give your opinions at #fedora-design at irc.freenode.net or at design team mailing list.

Now for the supplemental wallpapers. The full list of those that are included is in a dedicated wiki page. They are ready to use in both gnome (as usual you need a package ending with -gnome) and kde (package ending with -kde) and we hope to make them ready to use in LXDE and XFCE as well in the future (if people know how to do it, so I won't have to figure it myself, it would help a lot ;-)).

And now for the most important part — how to get them? If you're on F14 or rawhide it's as simple as running
# yum update
for the default wallpaper and
# yum install laughlin-backgrounds-extras-gnome
for the supplemental wallpapers ready for use in gnome and
# yum install laughlin-backgrounds-extras-kde
for the supplemental wallpapers ready for use in kde. Both will pull in also laughlin-backgrounds-extras-single where the actual images are stored. The packages can be downloaded from koji otherwise.

There's also bunch of updated splashes for firstboot, anaconda, grub, syslinux, ... See them in a dedicated wiki page.

What I still don't like on gnome-shell

I try to periodically try out gnome-shell which is supposedly going to be the base component of our default DE (desktop environment) in Fedora 15. And each time I try it (at least once per Fedora release) it's better, but for some reason I still don't like it. So here's a post where I try to point out a few things I don't like about it. But let's start a bit more positive. Despite me not liking dark styles, the gnome-shell in F14 is finally looking slick and no major design gliches are present. Good work gnome-design team! Also, even on my Intel GMA 945 the animations are smooth and there're no apparent delays that I could blame on slow graphics.

Running new application can be speedy as well unless you don't know its name. You know, typing first few letters of firefox gets you to firefox really quick, but when you start searching by hand it get's tedious — the menu has absolutelly no sorting into categories… But that's not a big issue, as long as you properly set up your favourite apps (after all, in my usual setup I also use menu rarelly) :-)

And now for the few bad things

• I'm the type of folks who like to have their favourite apps launchers always on screen, in gnome-shell I need to first zoom out to be able to run an application.
• Despite the app icon+name in top panel being finally clickable, gnome-shell still thinks window=task which is inherently wrong and makes switching e.g. between two teminal windows or between main evolution window and message composing window terrible. I hope the developers finally get the hint and start treating virtual desktop as equivalent to task.
• No panel widgets. Which means no weather applet, no CPU and network speed graphs, no always visible task switcher (you have to zoom out to be able to visually identify task which you want to switch to).
• Notifications. Part of the idea is cool and works great — like when setroubleshooter notifies me of an encountered problem by sliding in a notification from bottom of the desktop, and keeping it in the stack after it disappears. However I haven't found a way how to remove it from the stack other then clicking on some action in the notiffication which obviously does not work e.g. for rhythmbox notification where the only actions are next and prev…

My simple desktop

In order to relieve some stress from studying for my next exam I decided to participate in the show-your-desktop-on-the-fedora-planet thing.

So here's the screenshot:



Highlights:

• Gnome of F12, dual-booting with F14 where the desktop looks very similar
• Simple gradient on top panel, semi-transparency on bottom panel.
• Exploiting nautilus to show my school timetable on desktop (this is becoming more and more broken with every other release of fedora…)
• Rather tidy desktop with just a small number of icons, favourite app launchers assorted in bottom panel.
• One of the candidates for the default F14 wallpaper as background image.
• Six desktops, task based usage.
• Echo Perspective icon theme.
• Nodoka for metacity and gtk.

Nodoka GTK Engine 0.7.5 Released, Status Update on 1.x

A few moments ago I released gtk-nodoka-engine-0.7.5 tarball, built it for fedora and submitted as updates. There are more changes and not all of them are bugfixes, hence the jump from 0.7.2 straight to 0.7.5. For Fedora users the changes are smaller as the bug fixes were already present in the packages. Here's the changelog:

• I did some improvements to build system, one of which fixes upstream bug 39 (people from BSD cannot use GNU extensions to 'install')
• I fixed greying out of checkboxes in tree-view (red hat bugzilla #513454)
• This version adds support for GtkScale trough-side-details and fill-level (red hat bugzilla #477941) and support for selection and hilight coloring for separator (red hat bugzilla #478443)
• It honors GtkEntry::transparent-bg-hint (red hat bugzilla #489111) which means you'll get transparent entries in firefox.
• I also implemented support for 'entry-progress' detail which means you'll have e.g. page loading progress in epiphany or midori, when shown in location bar, looking finally nice.
• Finally, I ported the engine to GTK3 and to keep same tarball for GTK2 as well, it was needed to drop support for GTK+ < 2.18.

Please test the fedora packages for possible bugs and give feedback in bodhi, thanks:

• for Fedora 12,
• for Fedora 13,
• for Fedora 14.

I've been also slowly updating the 1.x branch, more specifically the initial widget design for MODERN style and mostly finished it. Here and there some finishing touches would be needed (like I'm not 100 % satisfied with the horizontal versions of the progress bars and scales and notebooks other than with tabs on top), but that's for later phases. When I'll have some more time, I'll start working in initial widget design for GLOSSY style (or maybe I shall call it GLASSY) which should appeal to people who like glass. Of course, comments are welcome and direct help even more so, source SVG for the MODERN style is in git and is always current. Finally, here's a PNG preview (click to show in original size):


Note for people who don't like the blue – I picked my favourite shade of blue, which is incidentally from echo icon color palette, and used it in the design as SELECTED color. It does not necessarily mean I'll end up using this particular colour in the final theme, and it also will be configurable via the Appearance Preferences->Customize Theme->Colors->Selected items. I'm not sure where (and if) this will be in Gnome 3…

And a note about used font: for some reason, I don't recall exactly which, I started using the SVG preview of the font I sketched the other day. The main problem is that it has only one size, no bold, and nothing other than letters of English alphabet and number 1 :-D But surprisingly it looks pretty decent (even though the bold is faked by adding borders to the letters in inkscape…), IMHO.

The WebM Problem

Well, lots of people are hyped about the WebM format (which is basically some kind of matroska based [btw. can be (de)muxed properly with new matroska tools] container, VP8 video codec [which was recently opensourced by google and thus is available in fedora] and Vorbis audio codec) which is understandable as it brings open standards to the web and you can play it even with a fresh install of fedora (well, since it was introduced only recently, this is true since the now-soon-to-be-released F14 Alpha).

And to lead the way, youtube is supporting it. But there's a huge but. On youtube it's available only if you enable html5 beta testing, by far not all videos on youtube can be played without flash and out of this subset only even a smaller number of them have been transcoded to WebM, so as a result if you are lucky, you'll play almost anything, and if you're unlucky, you'll either keep getting messages about missing flashplayer or missing h264 codec :( And to add to that, google is being ass and instead of querying the browsers for support, it uses user agent sniffing and thus effectivelly bans all other browsers than opera/firefox/chrome/safari/internet explorer from html5.

Someone should tell the web developers that there are zillion browsers out there that have support for advanced web features comparable to that in opera/firefox/chrome and that user agent spoofing is broken by design (unless you target it the otherway round &ndash send some quirks to browsers that are known to be broken). It's not a hard thing to masquerade my midori as firefox or safari, but I would prefer if I hadn't have to do that…