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Right now I’m doing my best to coordinate the editing and encoding work for the GTK+-hackfest interviews (some volunteers I still have to answer). What I’m looking for at the moment is GTK+-ish branding for the videos. All interviews should share the same look and feel in terms of branding. Everybody with some (or a lot) of experience in these regards is welcomed to send in suggestions (e.g. templates as SVG would be great). Try to stick as much as you can to established cues from GTK+ (read: don’t go for MTV-like graffiti-style… while that by itself might look stylish, that’s just not GTK+… you get the idea).
I’ll collect your submissions for a week and then let a vote on the top 5 (depending on how much material I get) happen on my blog here.
Here are a couple of guidelines to consider:

• branding-overlay using GTK-logo, name of interviewed dev, main project/company affiliation of dev
• intro- and outro-screen
• provide templates of screen-layout as SVG
• have 4:3 and 16:9 aspect-ratio versions
• PAL 720×576 (4:3 aspect)
• your work has to be CC-SA-BY

Add anything you’d find helpful or missing from the above list.

This very blog-post is one more piece of proof that Ubuntu is ready for the masses (hardware-wise for sure in this case). Public machine in a lounge at CapeTown airport … insert Ubuntu LiveCD … boot … everything works out of the box … even 3D-acceleration

Gee, I feel like a rebel now

general request:
Everybody who is a sophisticated/seasoned/established/*insert.favourite.buzzword* video-editor and would like to help the GTK+-community should email me, if they want to help with beating GTK+-hackfest interviews into shape.

requirements:

• have good skills with editing raw DV-files
• have an artistic eye for spicing up my boring recordings
• use of OpenSource tools prefered, but commercial tools are ok too
• have a “get the job done”-attitude
• do volunteer work
• have high-speed internet access
• stick to branding/artwork to be provided by GTK+-community

task:

• cut out boring parts of interviews
• interact with interviewed develeopers about technical/content-questions
• cut together a teaser/sampler of key moments of all interviews
• encode final cut of each interview to theora/vorbis in ogg-container
• stuff interviews also on YouTube/Vimeo/*your.favourite.video.site*

Any further information should be exchanged via eMails. Thanks in advance for your consideration!

Just wanted to give big props to the Xorg-hackers (especially Kristian “krh” Hoegsberg) for DRI2 and the related bits, making redirected direct rendering (in layman terms: “GL under compiz”) on my i965 system a reality. I totally love that!

Some time ago - around the beta period in the intrepid cycle - I’ve found a nice mockup of a window on deviantart by willwill100. While that was an idea for the gdm-login, which as such I did not like within the login-scope, I liked the style of the window itself. Fast forward to the present days. I found some time here and there and in between to hack a bit on this. What I got so far looks like this:

(click for full size)

On the left you see the mockup-image in eog and on the right the implemented thing. There are remaining issues to be solved and fixed, but it’s getting there. Once I’ve found some more time to finish it, I’ll put it somewhere at a publicly accessable spot.

The nicest bit about this kind of look is the fully outline-less border and the artefact-free wobbling (if you happen to have that enabled). The end of the story is: client-side drawn window-decorations is the next big thing imo. The idea is not new and I did not come up with this concept (krh did). More and more I run into situations, where I wish we already had those in gtk+ and Qt.

Here is another good reason to use high-res icons. Buddy-login notifications from the pidgin libnotify-plugin. In addition to that, relying on notify-osd’s “truncation” capability (query for it, don’t just assume it’s there) brings further polish for free. It takes the burden of truncating notification text (summary and body) from an application.
A before/after screencast for buddy-login notifications from pidgin demonstrates the visual benefits clearly:

The notification development guideline will have an updated section dealing with the “truncation” capability soon.