I think all the changes you made are indeed improvements to an already amazing theme! Personally, I like the precision cursor with the "frosted tips" better, but I hardly ever use that cursor in practice, so I'll leave the decision whether it would be practical to those who use it regularly.

I'm thinking the work on these cursor themes have progressed far enough that I'd very much like to present a set of candidates to the Plasma Workspaces team.

Unless someone else wants to do it, I'm happy to volunteer to present the candidate cursor themes if I can get the following for each candidate theme:
1. A single presentation pic with all the cursors visible.
2. Any additional wording you want to include like the name of the theme, maybe the inspiration or mood you were aiming for, whatever. Don't feel obligated to do this. I just wanted to offer it as an option in case there is specific message you would like to communicate. You can also including the wording directly in the presentation pic if you prefer.

If you'd like me to use anything already shared here, let me know. Once I get this for each theme I'll pitch for two things: Inclusion as part of the released Plasma Workspace and default for the Plasma workspace.

Whatever themes are selected we'll likely need to work together to get them ready inclusion in the Plasma Workspace repository.

Whatever themes aren't selected, I encourage you to make them available to the wider community via KDE-Look or some such. Maybe with a "KDEVDG" prefix or suffix in the name if you'd like folks to know it came out of your participation in this community. How cool would it be if we could search for "KDEVDG" in GHNS to find all the great work from this community?

Great plan, Andrew!
I think it could work like that pretty well.
One small nitpick (just to avoid getting more confusion into the whole branding circus): For Plasma Next, "Workspaces" was dropped from the name. It's just Plasma now (in the case of cursors probably Plasma Desktop, since they won't be used in a mobile setting anyway).

Kver wrote:
Source: http://kver.ca/bridge-clean.svg

Change Summary:

• Named the cursor set "Bridge", after Lerouxs' observation. If anyone has a better name I'm uncreative in that department.
• Removed the holes found in the calligraphy and kill cursors.
• Re-drew 2 new precision cursors, added colour-selection.
• Switched from line-arrows to triangular arrows.
• Various adjustments on most icons.

Next week or this weekend if I can I'll try to convert this over into an actual usable icon set if I can wrap my head around it.

I like it a lot!

Though if I may come with some comments/criticism, even though it's my first post:

• I agree with colomar: I absolutely love the precision cursor with frosted tips! However, I'm pretty sure that during actual use, the frosted bits will actually become distracting... So unless there's a way to have them both, I think I'd side with the regular precision pointer.
• The triangular arrows look better I think. Not that the line arrows didn't look good as well, but I think the triangular arrows are a bit easier for the brain to process as "arrows".
• Would you consider making the splitters and the top, bottom, left, right cursors with a thinner bar? The current one looks very.. "imposing" to me. Maybe they could be only half as thick?
• Shouldn't there be a tip (like the draw icon pencil has) on the colour picker? If one is trying to pick the colour of a specific pixel, it would be rather hard right now since we can't see where the tip itself is.
• Could you make the forbidden, busy, zoom in and zoom out icons transparent in the middle, instead of the white? Or would that just look bad?

Kver wrote:Next week or this weekend if I can I'll try to convert this over into an actual usable icon set if I can wrap my head around it.

awesome!

PS: there‘s a bug in the preview-pic: “no-drop” is also named “default”

flying sheep wrote:

Kver wrote:Next week or this weekend if I can I'll try to convert this over into an actual usable icon set if I can wrap my head around it.

awesome!

PS: there‘s a bug in the preview-pic: “no-drop” is also named “default”

That's not a bug, it's a feature.

alake wrote:I'm thinking the work on these cursor themes have progressed far enough that I'd very much like to present a set of candidates to the Plasma Workspaces team.
Unless someone else wants to do it, I'm happy to volunteer to present the candidate cursor themes if I can get the following for each candidate theme...
*snip*
...Whatever themes aren't selected, I encourage you to make them available to the wider community via KDE-Look or some such. Maybe with a "KDEVDG" prefix or suffix in the name if you'd like folks to know it came out of your participation in this community. How cool would it be if we could search for "KDEVDG" in GHNS to find all the great work from this community?

Sounds good to me. I'll be posting one more presentation pic in response to Veqs on the weekend, that would probably be the one to use when it goes up. I'm also missing some cursors, so any stragglers will also be included.

As per names/descriptions, I'm officially calling the set "Bridge" - I know it's an 'unsexy' name so I'm open to suggestions if anyone wants to change it.

veqz wrote:I like it a lot!
Though if I may come with some comments/criticism, even though it's my first post:

• I agree with colomar: I absolutely love the precision cursor with frosted tips! However, I'm pretty sure that during actual use, the frosted bits will actually become distracting... So unless there's a way to have them both, I think I'd side with the regular precision pointer.
• The triangular arrows look better I think. Not that the line arrows didn't look good as well, but I think the triangular arrows are a bit easier for the brain to process as "arrows".
• Would you consider making the splitters and the top, bottom, left, right cursors with a thinner bar? The current one looks very.. "imposing" to me. Maybe they could be only half as thick?
• Shouldn't there be a tip (like the draw icon pencil has) on the colour picker? If one is trying to pick the colour of a specific pixel, it would be rather hard right now since we can't see where the tip itself is.
• Could you make the forbidden, busy, zoom in and zoom out icons transparent in the middle, instead of the white? Or would that just look bad?

Welcome to the KDE forums!

• I think frosted tips on precision select will go the way of the dodo. It dawned on me that they look like paddles or q-tips, and I refuse to precision-select with q-tip-crosshairs.
• I'll do up some thinned-down splitter cursors, odds are that's what will ultimately be used. I've found the set has "settled" into a bit of a pattern, and the chunkier splitters no longer fit the overall design.
• I probably won't be hollowing out the background of forbidden/busy/zooms; Origionally I did use hollowed out versions but I found that the smaller waiting/nodrop symbols looked bad hollowed out, and I think it's important that they match their larger cousins. The busy cursor also looks much cleaner when animating.

In other news; I wrapped my head around actually making the cursor set, I was making the whole thing overcomplicated. It seems like it's a simple - albut inefficent process. This weekend I'll be preparing a usable version of the theme.

Unless someone else wants to do it, I'm happy to volunteer to present the candidate cursor themes if I can get the following for each candidate theme:
1. A single presentation pic with all the cursors visible.
2. Any additional wording you want to include like the name of the theme, maybe the inspiration or mood you were aiming for, whatever. Don't feel obligated to do this. I just wanted to offer it as an option in case there is specific message you would like to communicate. You can also including the wording directly in the presentation pic if you prefer.

Perspective cursor theme. Conventional, elegant, high contrast theme without distracting details but with clean proportions, smooth and simple lines and clear glyphs. You are using it without paying attention to it. Created after trying many other variants.

Live, usable production version of Bridge; There's a likely chance this cursor set could eat your babies, I've been using it for about 3 hours now and I've fixed some minor issues so please let me know if there's any weirdness going on with the set. I also don't know when some of the more exotic cursors are displayed, so if anyone has facilities to test it or knows apps that use less common cursors please let me know if I've got them in correctly.

Also, there's a white version of the set ("Snow Bridge") which will come out sometime next week as I get the chance. I also expect I'll be preparing one more revision based on feedback from real-world testing.

Currently the cursor-set is solid-set at a size of 24; but I've added a (very) basic build script, so more sizes should be coming soon, I expect I'll be upgrading my little script to directly render cursors from SVG files, so I'll share that if people like working with monolithic SVG files. About the only thing it doesn't do is trim whitespace, which is something that still needs to be done manually in GIMP. The first version of the build script is in the source download - but it's not particularly useful yet, and requires using the inkscape slicer export plugin.

Name: "Bridge"
Description: Bridge is a cursor-set designed to modernize contemporary KDE cursors while keeping their iconic style intact.
Preview:

Live download: http://kver.ca/bridgeCursor/bridge.tar.gz
Source: http://kver.ca/bridgeCursor/source.zip

Just unpack it into your icons folder and you should be up and running. Once I have the build script 100% and to a nearly point-and-click level of ease I'll upload the sources to a formal formal online repository.

... Aaaand here's what Snow bridge looks like, it should land next week some time:

Kver wrote:Name: "Bridge"
Description: Bridge is a cursor-set designed to modernize contemporary KDE cursors while keeping their iconic style intact.
Live download: http://kver.ca/bridgeCursor/bridge.tar.gz
Source: http://kver.ca/bridgeCursor/source.zip

really really amazing!

some bugs tho:

some should have underscores instead of dashes (inconsitent, i know but it’s what we have to live with): size_bdiag, size_fdiag, size_hor, size_ver, right_side, top_side, bottom_side
some symlinks should exist:

• ibeam → text
• xterm → text
• left_ptr → default
• left_ptr_watch → progress
• left_ptr_help → help
• question_arrow → help
• split_v → col-resize
• split_h → row-resize
• plus → cell
• n-resize → top_side (or alternatively size_ver)
• s-resize → bottom_side (or alternatively size_ver)
• w-resize → left_side (or alternatively size_hor)
• e-resize → right_side (or alternatively size_hot)
• nw-resize → top_left_corner → size_fdiag (this one and the 3 following aren’t real aliases, but instead similar things in case you don’t want to do the corners)
• se-resize → bottom_right_corner → size_fdiag
• ne-resize → top_right_corner → size_bdiag
• sw-resize → bottom_left_corner → size_bdiag

left_side is missing

and generally: any reason for using copies instead of symlinks (both watch and wait exist, w-resize isn’t a symlink to size_hor, …)

/edit updated bugs

@Kver: I wanted to try your cursor theme but it doesn't work correctly. Maybe because of the bugs mentioned by @flying_sheep?

Nuc!eoN wrote:@Kver: I wanted to try your cursor theme but it doesn't work correctly. Maybe because of the bugs mentioned by @flying_sheep?

kver has uploaded a new version already, but it still contains bugs (absolute instead of relative symlinks)

here is my fixed version: http://www.mediafire.com/download/378iu ... dge.tar.gz

flying sheep wrote:

Nuc!eoN wrote:@Kver: I wanted to try your cursor theme but it doesn't work correctly. Maybe because of the bugs mentioned by @flying_sheep?

kver has uploaded a new version already, but it still contains bugs (absolute instead of relative symlinks)

here is my fixed version: http://www.mediafire.com/download/378iu ... dge.tar.gz

Thanks, it's better but still buggy:

Nuc!eoN wrote:

flying sheep wrote:

Nuc!eoN wrote:@Kver: I wanted to try your cursor theme but it doesn't work correctly. Maybe because of the bugs mentioned by @flying_sheep?

kver has uploaded a new version already, but it still contains bugs (absolute instead of relative symlinks)

here is my fixed version: http://www.mediafire.com/download/378iu ... dge.tar.gz

Thanks, it's better but still buggy:

I'm a bit disappointed that I had such a buggy start - I thought I ironed out those issues. Anyway, I built on flying_sheeps' work, made more of the cursors symlinks and found several missing pointers which I think are the cause of your woes. I've already replaced the download link, but here it is for completeness' sake;
http://kver.ca/bridgeCursor/bridge.tar.gz

I will also note that there appears to be some bugs (at least in my version) of KDE in relation to cursor-switching, namely that Kwin appears to keep some of the old cursors loaded unless you log out or manually restart Kwin. Some programs also need to be closed/reopened in a similar manner.

So, sorry for those issues! I'm unsure if this thread is appropriate for 'bug reporting' or not since this isn't super-formal, but hopefully there shouldn't be too much more need for that. If there are issues, I'll make another thread somewhere else so I don't hijack this one any more than I already have.

EDIT:
*slams head on desk* Please wait before using the newest upload - I've noticed some regressions, so i'd just like to do a quick fix before more posts come in reporting them. I'll edit this when things are AOK.

EDIT #2: Fixed. Just some underscores where there shouldn't have been.

@Kver
There's still one icon missing for me, unfortunately.

But the rest looks fantastic already!