AIR: it’s official

Graphics

AIR

This is not a shocking news since the Air Plasma theme was developed all in the open, so there are literally months that screenshots of it are around the interwebs, but since today it’s official: the Air theme is the default plasma theme 🙂

It has been moved today into kdebase alongside Oxygen and made the default (Oxigen is of course still available)

Nearly all elements of this theme are redone from scratch, the idea of the look is of couse by Nuno Pinheiro, it’s amazing how he can make something that looks great out of nothing, I was just the mere executor of the elements (the fun activity of the “rename party” that who has done plasma themes knows :P)

The look of the theme is done to look really light an unobtrusive, let’s say that the target demographic of it should be wider: unfortunately Oxygen seemed to polarize people between love and hate, too bad, because i ireally love it eheh 🙂

There is a thing in this theme that is new in KDE 4.3 (besides the usual element additions here and there) tose circles that apear over the applets: they are really transparent, just a filigrane, and their position is random (well, actually highly predictabe pseudo-random, but that is what we need here), and that becomes useful to quicly tell apart one widget from the other (since the position of the overlay in an applet is the same across different sessions, until the widget gets removed). This can be useful also in the idea of common branding (with subtle differences across distributions, instead of total difference)

20 thoughts on “AIR: it’s official

  1. sheytan

    Yeah! It’s amazing. I saw the new kdm theme, and it’s amazing, too. I done a splash screen, now it’s in Nuno’s hands… waiting for final version 😀

  2. Daniel

    In my opinion these circles are irritating/distracting the user.
    I generelly like the idea, but they could be less intrusive.

    Anyway I like air more than oxygen. 😉
    And I like your always very interesting posts. 🙂

  3. rzzvfi

    Looking at the screenshot Dolphin somehow seems kinda, well out of place? Sadly we can’t use plasma themes for standard qt/kde widgets or can we? THAT would look really awesome.

  4. lordbla

    agreed. the AIR plasma-theme looks really cool, but the oxygen window-theme on dolphin looks kinda wrong. Is there another surprise planed for 4.3? ^^

  5. Dread Knight

    I like it, looking forward to try it out.

    I think rzzvli has a point, an unified look would be interesting, but on the other side of the moon, might confuse users because some ‘windows’ act differently then the others. So having a windows above the plasmoids would sort of blend them in together and making things harder and confusing.

  6. non7top

    Air is nice, but some people are still waiting for polyester port to kde4. And tastymenu. Two of three things that still keep me on kde3 (the last one is kirocker).

    PS your CMS is hardly broken 🙂

  7. frustphil

    @rzzvfi: +1
    maybe we should learn from windows 7 as to how it blends aero/glass with its widgets?

  8. Giuseppe

    General comments:
    0) It’s Windows Vista. Period. The “common brand” is Windows Vista.

    1) Please, please, please don’t do screenshots when using fonts that freetype doesn’t render properly (due to the fonts themselves, or the lack of the hinter bytecode interpreter, small font sizes, monitor resolution). You can see it very easily in the screenshot, look at the Dolphin’s toolbar: “Icons” “Columns” “Split” have *wrong* kernings.

    I saw this in MANY OTHER screenshots. KDE needs a “screenshots policy”: when someone needs to do a screenshot for showing graphic/aesthetic details, he/she must set the very same font, the very same screen resolution and so on. The user is still able to change the font if he wants, but it doesn’t make sense to use poorly rendered fonts to show the beautiness of a design!

    2) Why so many unconsistencies? There are a lot of different typefaces even between “similar” things (plasmoids, windows…) and I don’t see why.

    /** **/
    And now, something that DOESN’T work:

    http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/981/airh.png

    see reference picture for numbering details.

    These are graphic / conceptual errors which I think must be fixed or at least discussed.

    1) “Desktop Folder” is not centered vertically in what seems to be a “plasmoid titlebar”

    2) The application icon is not centered vertically

    3) Too little margin on top of the icons

    4) strings that aren’t already fixed…? “isPartOf”?

    5) The lower window border is thickier than the left/right one

    6) Not vertically centered

    7) THY UGLIEST FONT! Why is that???

    8) Lots of space wasted here; the “reflection” is broken (it should be much more blurred and go UNDER the items in order to avoid to waste space)

    9) What’s that? Why there is no title?

    10) Why notification “titlebars” are different from plasmoid titlebars that are in turn different from windows titlebars? CONSISTENCY!

    11) The text in the box in the taskbar is not centered vertically

    12) The “box” itself (the entry) is not centered vertically in the panel

    13) The clock has different left/right margins

    14) The search lineedit is 1 pixel too short on top

    15) Why the “expand” arrow is so distant from the last icon in the systray? Why that wasted space there?

    My 2c.

  9. xhit

    I like this new Air theme, so +1.

    I don’t see the problems Giuseppe is reporting here: The font is ok and all the “is not centered vertically” are at most a matter of taste. IMO these 15 points are more trollish than helpful.

    My 2c

  10. Giuseppe

    > I don’t see the problems Giuseppe is reporting here: The font is ok and

    The font is NOT ok, and if you say so you should document about proper subpixel kerning.

    > all the “is not centered vertically” are at most a matter of taste.

    It’s what we are talking about: theming. Taste. You can like the general feel, but mine are objective considerations: those UI elements NOT centered, spaced or whatever.

    > IMO these 15 points are more trollish than helpful.
    Please argue properly: I brought precise, accurate and sharp observations, and getting rid of them with “they’re trollish” does not help.

  11. nuno pinhero

    Just one question did you look at the fonts in dolphin on a scaled version of that screenshot??? Its liberation sans full hinting on and no rgb subhinting.
    Liberation sans comes from IMO the best fonts team in the world, they dont get the kerning wrong.

    I do agre on many of you coments, but as they say rome was not build in a day..

  12. Giuseppe

    Dear Nuno,
    I did not look at a scaled version (at least I hope the one notmart posted ISN’T a scaled version :-)).

    That font (or maybe the rasterizer, or maybe both!) has IMHO some kerning/hinting problems when it comes to very small sizes. For instance, the “il” and “li” couples are too spaced (see Details, or Split). I know that that’s not a KDE problem, rather a more general one.

    I was ranting about it: it’s just another issue to solve, because it’s good to have small fonts in toolbars, tooltips etc., but those fonts must be rendered properly.

    In the meanwhile, I would avoid doing demonstrative screenshots about themes / look&feel and so on with those glitches; that’s why I was suggesting a KDE “policy” on screenshots, in which specify which theme one must use, which fonts, which screen resolution and so on. But that’s absolutely IMHO and a bit offtopic (is there a proper ML or irc channel to talk about this?)

    > I do agre on many of you coments, but as they say rome was not build in a day..

    That’s fine, and I do really appreciate your work! Consider my post something like a “bug report” 🙂

  13. Marco Martin

    no, that screenshot is not scaled,
    and that font is more or less the best we can do under linux, far from perfect, bus as good as it can get, avoiding to put any screenshot just because omg can’t be done in a perfect way, i hope that some day we will get font rendering comparable to other platforms but until that day…

  14. Lee

    I’m glad to hear that’s the best font you can do, as it tells me that the ugly font problem in KDE 4 isn’t in KDE’s fault. But there is definitely a problem there, and it must be in Qt4 then, because GNOME has quite beautiful fonts by comparison.

    As for the theme in general… it’s quite nice; good to see something for KDE 4 that isn’t black.

  15. Marco Martin

    nah, maybe they have a font by default you like more (ubuntu uses dejavu iirc), but if a gtk app and a qt one are set to the same font and same dpi the result is identical, i.e. you can superimpose one to the other in gimp, with substract composition and the result is exactly black

  16. Iuri Fiedoruk

    It only looks good really if you have desktop effects enabled, otherwise it is much worse than Oxygen.
    Please consider keeping alive, and as default, a theme for us, who do not like to waste CPU/RAM with desktop effects, please?

  17. Jordan

    I know Giuseppe’s post might have come across as a bit troll-ish/rude, however I went through his suggestions and they are pretty spot on. It’d be nice if some/all of those would be able to be fixed by release.

    Even with the minor imperfections, I love the new theme. Great work.

  18. Claes

    I think the “circles background” idea is good, but I think they should blend in more. I think there is nothing wrong if they are hardly visible at all. I would like to see the look of them with minimal contrast.

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