Pixelfuckers

It’s on. We’re pushing the deadline to June 24th since we were a little slow on the formal announcement, so get your submissions and comments/ratings in before then (starting now!)

The rules: submit a screenshot to the newly created “SSC 10” category, and list proper notes, as always. The screenshots will be rated on overall aesthetic, cohesion and innovation. There aren’t separate categories for different OSes, but we have a pretty informed community who I’m sure will be factoring difficulty and limitations into their ratings. Scores will be determined by an average of the admin and user ratings. Votes will be tallied at 11:59pm EST (UST -0500) on June 24th.

1st Prize: $50 and a pixelfuckers tee shirt, hot from the printer.
2nd Prize: a pf tee

Be sure to browse the SSC 09 category for inspiration, spread the word, and let’s see your best!

Let’s have em’!

Also, announcements regarding SSC 10 prizes will be coming shortly.

Well with ssc ’10 around the corner and the influx of new users, I thought it would be nice to throw out some pointers for those just starting out and presenting those beautiful setups.

1. Authenticity

This is important. Don’t photoshop it, don’t fake it, It’s never okay (unless it’s a mock-up, and in that case that doesn’t really apply here). And although ripping is not so common anymore, if it ever was. It’s still important to point out, if not too obvious.

2. System monitoring

Rainmeter – Okay so like, rainmeter is the ish for stuff like monitoring your torrents and mail-checker configs, unnecessary monitoring is tasteless, if you’re on a pc where you need to watch resources, that’s completely understandable, but if you’re only using it because it looks fancy, then that’s a little pointless and redundant (using resources to monitor resources). Also it’s on too many lifehacker featured desktops which rarely impress.

Samurize – I hardly see it used anymore but it’s great if you’re not using an alternate shell and you’re still in xp, check bernds shots here nitzuas old shots back on custo for some great examples.

Geektool – (See issues with overcompensating on rainmeter^^^^^)

Conky – Linux users generally use conky the same way that I stated was unnecessary in rainmeter, but for some reason I find it to be more acceptable, I’m not the authority on what’s legit and what isn’t, I’m “just sayin”.
In short, don’t be too try too hard with rainmeter and geektool configs.

3. Usability

Don’t sacrifice too much usability for a sexy setup. Function and form should always be as balanced as possible. This should be fairly self explanatory.

4. Don’t be too trendy

Styles come and go, for some people they have their own style, and for others they may tend to change their desktop depending upon the most popular recent styles. For good ideas on original content, visit your favorite design sites and portfolios, or a site designed by your favorite studio, pick out elements from the site itself and build something around that to practice, for examples check out nuuvo’s older stuff, like monc which was based on monc.se

5. Consistency

Colors, fonts, icons, fonts, fonts, I often don’t follow my own advice but, fonts.
If your setup is a relaxed setup based on usability default app icons are generally acceptable, though slight modifications are even better.

6. A good wall a day keeps the critics away

Okay well not a wall a day, what I’m saying is use a nice wall

- photowalls are more and more common, and how could they not be? there are plenty of great ones out there. Just make sure it fits!

- patterns/tiles aren’t a bad thing, especially when paired with a nice gradient.

- don’t make it too busy, you don’t your windows to awkwardly blend in with your wall because of a wall that’s too noisy and busy.

- as much as you liked to look at attractive females, they don’t always belong on your desktop.

- contrast is a great thing, dark walls with a light visual style/guikit/gtk theme almost always work out.

7. Mac emulation

If you’re not on a mac, don’t make it look like a mac (too much). Influence is okay, but you can never really emulate the feeling of os x.

8. Browsers

Chrome – not much can be done here.

Firefox – custom stylish scripts and tiny menu are your best friends. Minimalism while maintaining usability is always great, It looks slick and gives you more screen real estate to see what’s in your browser.

Opera – I don’t know much about customization in opera, as I’ve never really been a huge fan of the browser myself, but the gperfection suite opera skin showed me that (attractive) customization in opera is completely possible, as well as mangos shots.

Maxthon – why would you do that to yourself?

9. Your OS is always observed

The operating system you’re on, and it’s capabilities and limitations in relation to the difficulty of changing things is almost always taken into account.

10. Don’t over-do it.

I know I’ve already said this about multiple things but it’s very important in my opinion, I love reading lifehacker as much as anyone but seeing their featured desktops often makes me snort with derision, a busy desktop doesn’t always mean aesthetically pleasing.

11. THINGS THAT GO WITHOUT SAYING

RESHACK EVERYTHING.
DON’T RIP.
DON’T RIP.
IT’S A 99

Feel free to contribute to things already stated in the comments below.

Hey All,

Sadly, there were no submissions to the PF Improve contest :(. I will continue to offer these sorts of contests in the future though and see if we ever get any takers!

Moving on – Its time for SSC 10, folks. Any objections to the same format as last year? SSC often changes formats, so I’d have no problem with switching things up if you guys like.

I’m also thinking of creating a creating a special section on PF that only showcases the winners of all past SSC’s. Maybe, maybe not. What do you think?

Just a heads up, today is the last day for the PF improve contest. If anyone has anything to submit, please get it in before the end of the day! If there’s anything to judge, we will start on that tomorrow.

As for my submission to the contest:

Fixed User page so all of a user’s submissions and reviews are paginated

Enabled comment and review moderation for moderators and admins

Added a rating scale clue to the rating box (first javascript on the site!)

Changed the submit review button to an edit button when a review is being edited as opposed to being created.

All these updates should be live, so if you see any bugs with them just post em’!

Cheers!

Just sayin’.

:-D

As the deadline creeps closer, I just wanted to remind everyone that the Improve PF contest is still in full swing and that Christian (its his birthday today) whipped up the first official PF T-shirt mock.

Want one? Go for the win. Deadline is May 15th.

Let’s see ’em.

I’ve been unusually busy lately and consequently haven’t had the time to put into PF as I would like to. I promise I will be back working on the forums and adding more awesome to PF during the summer! In the mean time I want to encourage and remind the community that we’re open source and you can help work on the site too! I know inertia is tough to overcome though, especially if you don’t know how to code, but its easy to learn! To help with this I’m throwing out two prizes.

To win these prizes one must either contribute the best or second best additions to the community website. You can do this by using the public repository. For most of you you’re going to have to learn how to use the repository and Mercurial . This won’t be a walk in the park, but its not difficult either. Consider this a good thing as it will weed out a lot of the competition. Who knows you might be able to contribute something small like a style change or an icon and win if no one else goes through the trouble!

Once you manage to get PF running on your machine, your going to have to learn how to program a bit using Ruby on Rails. Fortunately its a very user friendly language and there are plenty of references available. Lastly I’ll be more than willing to help anyone interested so if you’re confused or stuck somewhere you’re welcome to pick my brain for what its worth. I’m usually idling in the PF chat room.

If you’re unsure what you can focus on there are a number of issues that are excellent suggestions and will all be contenders if solved for sure, however you’re welcome to suggest and work on your own ideas as well.

Now for the prizes. The 2nd place entry will get a Pixelfuckers T-shirt that will probably be designed by Christian/akka (I haven’t even talked to him about this yet, heh.). The first prize entry will also get a T-shirt and I’ll throw out $50 on top of it. I’ll beam it right to your Paypal account! The deadline is, say, May 15th, right before SSC 10 kicks off. The judges will be the PF admins.

I have no idea how this will play out, but I wish all participants the best of luck and also thank them for helping our open source community! I hope this not only benefits the site, but also helps educate our members about programming, and how its conducted as a team. If you have any questions, just post em’ in the comments.

Cheers,
Josh

:-D

It’s that time again, show some love and post your votes!

For Admins:

I setup the links on the layout so that pages can be hooked up to the actual links. I also fixed the textile issues so that it parses correctly.

To figure out the correct slug that should be used for the pages that are created, just hover over the links in the footer.

If you have any questions, just holla.

I’m happy to announce two new admins, nitzua and Kody . You have both contributed not only high quality submissions that serve as exemplars to the community, but also a high level of community participation in providing feedback to other users.

Additionally, we’ve added one new moderator, neiio who has been really pushing the boundaries of Windows 7 customization and has been a steady contributor.

Keep up the good work fellas.

Hello All,

A somewhat significant update was pushed up to the server today. This is targeted for the site admins, but will effect everybody.

Admins, you will now notice that under the “Admin” menu is a new link called “pages”. This will let you create static pages on the site. For example, you can now create an “About Us” page, give it a title, content (should be Textile friendly), and link (slug), create it, and then access it at http://pixelfuckers.org/static_page/your-slug.

Once we have created pages for all the info pages on the site, let me know and I will hook them up.

If you have any questions let me know!

Next on the list: Fixing bugs to the new page functionality and then onto forums!

Calling for featured nominations! Which submission(s) do you think should be in the spotlight?