Ubuntu Announces Rebranding

If any of you out there are Ubuntu fans like me, you'll be over the moon to read Jono Bacon's announcement about Ubuntu's rebranding! Here's the short version: the colour palette has shifted from brown with orange accents to a lovely aubergine with orange accents, and the whole visual style has been designed around the theme "light". Some hardcore Ubuntu-ites are already crying out for the loss of their beloved brown, but I for one see the change as welcome, and the look overall is more professional and polished than before. The new colours and style make Ubuntu look sleek and modern, and will help promote its position as one of the "big" mainstream operating systems.

Here are a few shots from the branding wiki page (which at the time of posting was only intermittently available, due to "technical constraints or capacity issues"!):




Well done to Jono and the team!

The Real Reason I Can't Bring Myself to Switch to KDE

I have tried KDE now, three times. And I've actually managed to get some great eye-candy out of it...In fact, in terms of looks, I do ADORE KDE. Some examples of what I've done with it in the past:

From Screenshots

From Screenshots

However, there's one little thing that means I can never quite stick with it! You might be forgiven for thinking it was one of the following:

• It is too resource-heavy compared to Gnome
• It annoys me slightly that the panel never matches the windows
• The zoom out feature is still a bit buggy
• The customisation settings, while more extensive than stock Gnome, are more difficult to get a grip of
• That damn KDE wallet asks me for my password every time I come back from suspend

...and so on and so forth. But in the end, all of these things are just little niggles, things that you would get over in time, just by using the desktop environment, and getting to know it better.

So what is it, then, you ask? Don't laugh...

Native KDE applications all have ridiculous names!!!

They all appear to be contrived to contain a "K" in some way, like when high school kids decide that it's not "wicked", it's "wikid". Or they just get lazy, and stick a "K" on the front of a literal name describing exactly what the application does. All you have to do is take a look at KDE's website to see what I mean:


So let's examine the evidence, and compare some Gnome and KDE default applications:

• Web browsers: Firefox vs. Konqueror
  I suppose Konqueror is more than just a web browser, so maybe that's what they were going for with the whole "conqueror" epithet, but it doesn't excuse the "K". It's up there with "Hed Kandi", "Krazy Glue" and "Krazy Kamp" (the musical my middle school put on in the 7th grade).
• Mail Clients: Evolution vs. KMail
  The lack of imagination here is just staggering. Could we not come up with a better name than "KMail" for a mail client in KDE?
• BitTorrent Clients: Transmission vs. KTorrent
  See above. Come on, guys, let's have a little naming creativity here!
• Music players: Rhythmbox vs. amaroK, now Amarok
  This one is arguably the weakest example, since the name actually means something in another language ("wolf" in Inuktitut), so the "K" is a transliteration anyway. Also, the dev team get points for seeing the light and fixing the capitalisation issue, which is what landed it on my list in the first place.
• Feed readers: n/a vs. Akregator
  In fairness, this isn't quite an even comparison because Gnome doesn't ship with a default feed reader. But "Akregator"?! Come on, it's "aggregator", so at the very least, it should be "Akkregator" or something...Basically, there's no excuse for this one...

Now, I can't be completely one-sided here, as Gnome has its fair share of awkwardly-named applications, like gedit, but it's nowhere near the volume that KDE has.

What it all comes down to is that I get embarrassed telling people that I use applications with such ridiculous names. All the major OSes, including Windows and MacOS, put a lot of thought into the names of their applications, and I wish KDE would do the same. If they could crack that, they'd pretty much have a convert!

I Have a New Launchpad PPA!

After many weeks of hard work, hacking and general Linux sneakiness, I have finally managed to make myself a PPA on Launchpad! What does that mean for you, my lovely adoring public? It means that I can finally publish scripts and works in progress in a way that makes them much easier to update. You can add my PPA to your repositories list, so when you install my Conky Widgets script, for instance, whenever I update it, it will be automatically pushed to you via Update Manager (as long as you are using Ubuntu, of course!).

My new PPA is located here. If you would like to add it to your repositories list, from Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, simply type the following at the command line:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:londonali1010/londonali1010

It will automatically add both the repository and the signing key to your sources list. If you are not running Karmic, please follow the instructions on my PPA page.

Anyway, the first package on the table is the "work in progress" that is my porting of the almighty Token icon set into a Gnome icon theme.

If you would like to have a go, please do, and leave me any feedback here!

Iconizer: Customise Icons Easily from a Huge Library (Cross-Platform)

Like the icons above? I made them myself! In under 30 seconds!

I stumbled upon a new website today, iconizer.net, and it's just what a lot of customisers have been looking for: a way to quickly choose and customise icons for downloading, with a huge library of source icons, from several different OSes and styles. Available styles include MacOSX, Vista, Aero and others.

Here's a quick guide to creating your own customised icons with iconizer.net:
Start by going to the home page. Actually, it's pretty straightforward, but I'll walk you through it anyway...
Select the category of icon from the left list; it will pop up a sub-menu of styles you have to choose from. For instance, here I've selected Applications -> Panther.

Once you've selected your category and style, click on the "Select Icon" drop-down box:
At this point, you will be presented with all the available icons for your category and style; simply click on the one you'd like to use.
On the next screen, you can choose what to customise:
You can choose which file format (from .jpeg, .png, .gif, .bmp, .ico), whether you keep the original colour or not, and if not, what to use as a foreground and background colour. You can also choose whether your background is transparent or not, and the size of the icon.

Finally, press "Generate Icon".
Your icon will appear on the top right of the page. For some reason, it doesn't turn up on the page correctly in my browser, but hey, it is beta, after all! However, despite not displaying on the page, it downloads just fine.

Et voila! You've got a lovely custom icon that you can use to populate a launcher/dock, or replace an entire icon theme (if you've got the time)!

Have you used iconizer to generate a custom icon? Want to share it? Post it here!

Success Secrets of the Graphic Design Superstars

Success Secrets of the Graphic Design Superstars

Simply essential reading, if you are interested in the world of graphic design.