Nu, pogodi!

13 Nov 2005 » permalink

I was recently watching a popular ex-comunistic cartoon called “Wolf and Hare”. If you happen to be old enough & born somewhere in the central-eastern Europe you surely know this forty-years old brilliant piece of Russian animation.

It’s a bit like Tom & Jerry thing but more rough on the edges. Wolf — being the “bad guy” — smokes cigarettes, tries to be a macho, rides a motorbike, etc. I've seen this series for the first time something like 18 years ago on 8mm projector operated by my father. Now, on DVD, it’s still 2 hours of best laugh I ever had.

There is this great scene when Wolf tries to pull out the hare by the ears from the magician’s hat — but he rolls kilometers of white tape instead. That got me somewhat inspired for the Diva icon.

Diva icons

The SVG Tango-style icon was polished by the master himself.

In other news I spent some time getting the final UI done, and here is a preview:

Diva icons

Few notes: I wanted to keep the actual video playback window as big as possible. During certain operations it will provide preview for two (or more) video sub-windows side by side.
It’s all a bit tango-stylized. I hope Tango will become default theme for Gnome soon. Please aid the ArtLibreSet effort if you’re an icon designer.
* The video output on the screenshot is mocked-up. Video playback engine is not really back yet.

In the upcoming days I'm planning to setup a Diva wiki that will serve as a resource for development, etc. I also want to freeze some (pluginnable) API parts so that hackers wanting to get on the Diva bandwagon can jump in without digging through the whole thing at once.

So, if you'd like to hack on a Banshee/Muine/F-Spot import plugin — do get in touch!

http://tango-project.org/Tango_Desktop_Project