Oct 31, 2009

The Shimmer Project Makes Open Source Beautiful

I'm happy to announce that I've now joined the newly created Shimmer Project. Pasi Lallinaho (knome) founded the project to make everything Open Source beautiful. We will not be tied with any particular project even if we work with them. You could think us of as freelancers of the Free Software world with the exception that we don’t ask for any money but only work for the projects and things we have passion for. The Shimmer team will try to contribute to various fields of FOSS projects, including artwork, GUI design, usability, desktop integration, et cetera.

When Pasi Lallinaho first announced the project on the Xubuntu Developer mailinglist he wrote:
...The reasoning behind setting up a separate group rose from my and Steves disappointment in the somewhat cold and dismissing acts of the DX (Desktop Experience) team, which lead us to do more and more work to fix things that we hadn't broken. We feel really bad that Canonical is making design decisions with only GNOME in scope and don't want to handle with fixing (in our opinion) their design flaws. Yet another thing that clearly became a burden too big is the Canonical half-yearly release schedule. With our new project we will be free of any other than our own schedules...

Our IRC channel is #shimmer on freenode. All of you are welcome to join us. Besides Pasi Lallinaho, the team consists of Steve Dodier, James Schriver, Simon Steinbeiß and myself. A hardcore team and I'm honored to have been invited to join them.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what this project will bring to the Free Software world.

http://shimmerproject.org/

5 comments:

  1. What a great start - the page seems to be down :-(
    Check back later...

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  2. Brilliant! Open source really needs an injection of beauty in my opinion. Can't wait to see what you guys come up with.

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  3. thats great news, but i just wanted to note that there so many ideas out there in Ubuntu brainstorm from people using Ubuntu, this information can be used to see customers needs and visions.

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  4. This is a great idea, good luck you guys

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  5. Great idea!
    Please beautify DIA so it can be used instead of Visio.;)

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