Alan and the Gnome CD Player

I guess Alan's feelings for Gnome CD Player are really strong: in half of one single post he manage to use the Gnome CD Player words no less than 20 times!

Alan, you are wrong saying "Evince is the PDF Viewer for Gnome", it is a document viewer for multiple document formats, which happens to be the default viewer for PDFs in Gnome. Its intention as a general purpose reader is (IMO) demonstrated by the recent efforts to make it read also PowerPoint files.

A great release is coming

I had a look in the incoming section of OCAL and expect the following release (the next week probably we will start to talk about it) to be a great one: we have as usual a large number of images from a lot of people but also some big and wonderful sets by Gerald like: diner menu collection, sailing illustrations and r15 of general.
On top of that the total number of the images will be increased by my cards collections (encouraged by Benji I uploaded all four decks).
If we make sure the two icon sets not validated last month will be included, this release will be huge.

PS: Of course, the incoming section contains some bad things, one example being woman_joao_01.jpg, which looks to me like a caveman style piece of art, but I know that image will not pass validation.

Cards::Conclusion

Following an advice on blog comments from Karl, changed the figures from serif to sans serif to match the font.

The package landed on OCAL (for now in incoming) - note to self: to be careful at the end of the month for the correct package (02) to be included in the release.

Also made a page on my website for the cards.

Conclusion?
It was an interesting experience to develop the set on the blog, with people giving feedback at every step. Benji tried something similar with the Tribal font, but I guess my cards had more "eye candy" and as a consequence the feedback was greater.

Alternate faces

Public question: this style is worth pursuing and using it instead of what I made yesterday?



Update: All four faces (the feedback was positive). Color variations will be used to generate each specific card.


Update: My blog became aggregated also by Planet linux360. I hope their readers will not be very annoyed by my graphic-heavy posts from the last days.

Faces

I am sure not everybody will like those faces (I am not very happy myself) but the cards will be hopefully part of the next release of the Open Clip Art Library, with a full Public Domain license, so anybody will be free to improve them.

I am a coward

Indeed, a coward I am: i got the idea that drawing the faces for the playing cards deck will be the hard part, so I do anything to delay it. The last thing was to do some backs:

Steps to the full Deck

So the boring part is done:


Next step: the hard part: drawing the faces and at least one back side. I have now just a vague idea on how to do them, something modern and original.
Note: I'm fully aware that the faces are the "salt and pepper" of the deck, the most important part of it.

After that, a future step will be to choose a final template, these are the candidates so far:


Of course I can to all of them but this may be just bloat: 216 images instead of 54. Hard decision to make: quantity or quality?

Playing Cards

I'm thinking about creating a complete playing cards set for the Open Clip Art Library and here are two samples:

What I really need is a sincere opinion: are those samples worthy? (quality wise) is such a set needed? (considering there is at least another one set with a free enough license).
The task may become boring at some point (54 figures!) and definitely will have some hard parts (cards with figures) so I'm not sure if is wise to engage in this task.

create.freedesktop.org

The infrastructure for the project is up and running:

• Website: a quick copy of the Planet OCAL with logos and feeds removed (more polishing needed)


• Mailing list, but only with my "frist prost" so far


• The default Wiki

To Do:

• clear the scope and maybe decide a policy;


• spread the word and get people from intersted projects (Inkscape, GIMP, Scribus, etc.) to join;


• create a particular look and feel for the site (new logo, favicon, style sheet);


• more? join the mailing list and propose