Last minute retouches (and then some)

Today started with the last finishing touches on KDE4’s sound theme.

How very Portuguese of me finish this up at 2 days from the absolute deadline.

All the sounds are done and accounted for, even those that will not be enabled of default on the system. The only thing left really is to update the techbase entries regarding name specs and the tech specs to include the brand new UI sounds (hyea, the ones that woun’t be enabled).

One funny aspect of this all is really the model of my master keyboard there. How’s that for a quirky coincidence?

I also spent the day at #oxygen today and I must give Riccardo a heart felt high-five for all the hoops and loops he’s been going through these last few days to make everything sparkling for things to go smoothly. He was juggling a million issues at the same time and still found time to help me with the sounds…

There are more musical projects in the workings, Riccardo will keep the screencasts going and that means I get to make more songs to go with it, which is always nice since doing UI sounds is interesting, but making proper tunes and seeing them applied to some visual work is really what makes my creative side tick. There is also new contacts being made by developers who need sounds and music (especially for games) and of course I’m totally up for that.

KDE wallpaper competition + Vacation roundup

As part of the Oxygen team I feel It’s my duty to spread Pinheiro’s dare among my part of the block. KDE4 needs photo based wallpapers, so feel free to submit your work and be a part of a mighty big revolution in opensource desktop environment. (if you’re psychotic imagine people staring at your photo for hours on end for weeks and weeks and weeks, hummm…how’s that for an incentive?)

Make sure you stop by Pinheiro’s blog, or head on directly to Ruphy’s site where you can find much more detailed information about it.

As to the vacations…well…it was a rather restful week and a half, spent in a scorching hot Alentejo, with warnings on the radio that felt a bit like beeing a character in Fallout “Wear white light cotton clothes, drink plenty of water and if you are old or incapacitated avoid leaving you home”. Also warning messages regarding forest fires were constant.
3 Books filled the week long of void in my brain (aka absence of work) : Blink! by Malcom Gladwell, The No Asshole Rule by Robbert I. Sutton and Small Is The New Big by Seth Godin. All of them wildly insightful, I heartedly recommend all of them, but Blink! got a very special place in my heart, I must admit.

So I’m off to an exciting and reinvigorating work comeback. Okay, maybe not.

I’ll try not to be an asshole. (I’m a bit more educated on the subject now.)

A Mild Distopyan View – Files Up

I decided to use box.net to host the files. Plus there’s the nice little widget on the side, which is always nice. There is some major re-vamping going on with the tunes right now so I just uploaded the 3rd track’s draft.

On another note I pretty much finished Oxygen’s basic set. Kopete and K3B are next.

The ad seems a bit stalled, but…there ya go.

Oxygen – Quite a bit done today.

Right! Everything is at 48.000Hz!

Plus I got the some other sounds done and I’ve brushed up the jingle a bit more.

I’ll soon enough start filling in the wiki Joseph pointed out to me a few weeks back, as to the naming specification of the sound theme.

I compiled the list of sound on the current version of KDE and I noticed that the accessibility sounds are supposed to have….well…sounds. I find this rather strange. Shouldn’t we be using synthesized voices to warn about those events? Abstract sounds shouldn’t be used to warn users that are potentially impaired. it seem’s quite counter-productive to me. I’ll dig a bit further regarding this and who I should contact to make this happen.

Bottom line is: speech synthesis is something that should be working “out of the box” in every single distro or desktop environment, for the sake of actual accessibility.

KDE’s sound standards

Good to know one is not alone.

I had a nice chat with Joseph Gaffney regarding sound and multimedia on KDE. He developed the documention stating the standards and bare minimums for sound specs. Turns out I’ve been creating my sounds at 44.000Hz and the minimum for KDE is 48.000 so I’ll have to redo the mastering of everything I’ve done until now.

Talking to Joseph got me musing about 5.1 sounds and how they’d seriousy make KDE standout from the other desktop enviornments,  I have however no idea on how to even start forging that sound on by my humble self. But I will surely investigate.