Just fixing a bug!

Or at least that was the plan... The original intent was simply to fix an issue in the Oxygen cursor theme. Some cursor sizes were missing and i thought this would be one of those quick fixes. You know... the kind that takes 10 minutes. Several days later I was redoing most of the animated cursors. One of the things I care a lot about is how much movement contributes to personality. Not just in interfaces, but in general. Animation is a bit like music. Two notes can contain the same information and still communicate completely different emotions. A lot of modern interfaces IMO tend to treat animation as "decoration". I tend to believe that movement is communication. The way something moves tells you what it is, and if not, at least makes it interesting to look at. I think it also comes across to users that if an animation has personality, then the developer or designer actually cares about the experience. One of the things that fascinates me about animation is that humans are absurdly good at detecting natural motion. We can forgive low resolution graphics, simplistic shapes and even questionable artwork. But if movement feels wrong people notice, even if they dont know why. Anyway, while revisiting the Oxygen cursors I wanted to stay close to what Ruphy originally created all those years ago while making them a bit more expressive. The busy animation is probably the best example. The old animation revolved around circular motion and the new one still does, but now its inspired by one of those old physics toys with pendulums and metal balls transferring momentum from one side to the other. Tension, release, acceleration, deceleration... tiny little things most people will never consciously notice, but i think they feal them. What started as fixing a few missing cursor sizes somehow ended with redoing most of the animations. Classic scope creep. The good kind :). side note i still managed to not fully fix the original bug i was trying to fix... but you can try it here cursorDescarregar The new Oxygen cursors, together with all the other improvements we've been making over the last few weeks, should be arriving with KDE Plasma 6.8. There is also a ton more that I'll mention in another blog post soon, and that Filip already hinted at in his own post. In the meantime 6.7 is out, and I hope you are enjoying what we have done so far. Its been fun seeing this old project slowly finding its place again, and I hope you'll have as much fun using it as we've had bringing it back to life.