We hadn’t metapixel packaged in openSUSE, so I created the package in Contrib repository. Then I started collecting the avatars of openSUSE users. I searched both twitter and identi.ca for messages containing “opensuse” and added the authors’ avatars to the pool. Identi.ca also has groups, so all members of openSUSE group ended there as well. Facebook contains both openSUSE group and openSUSE page so I grabbed all avatars I found there too. At the end I was able to collect 3760 avatars of people using or interested in openSUSE!

I started experimenting with metapixel, but because I still had 10 times less images available than Andreas, I was not able to produce very good results. Fortunately, I discovered -c option, which tries to create a collage instead of a mosaic, which looks much better. (Mosaic has photos arranged in a rectangular grid, while collage does not.) After some fiddling I was able to create the following pictures. I hope you like them! (use right click and “Save as” when downloading hi-res images)

hi-res: 6000×3754	hi-res: 6000×3750

If you’d like to play with the parameters I give you the tarballed avatars (6 MiB), original images (1 MiB) and the command lines I used to produce the image:

tar xfj opensuse-users.tar.bz2
tar xfj collage-sources.tar.bz2
mkdir ./opensuse-users-ready
metapixel-prepare --width=48 --height=48 ./opensuse-users ./opensuse-users-ready
metapixel -c -l ./opensuse-users-ready -w 48 -h 48 -m wavelet -d 500 -e global --metapixel opensuse-logo-6000.png opensuse-users-collage.png
metapixel -c -l ./opensuse-users-ready -w 48 -h 48 -m wavelet -d 300 -e global --metapixel chameleon.jpg opensuse-users-collage-2.png

Enjoy! (Don’t forget to install metapixel package from Contrib.)

Update: Lubomir Rintel tried to do a similar collage for Fedora users, check his version.

A few years ago, me and four of my friends were doing an university project, which was basically a web portal. While designing our application we needed a tool for creating mock-ups and screen prototypes. There are a lot of options like Wireframe Sketcher, Cleverlance Petra, but finally we ended up with Axure RP. Now I’m not sure why, but at least we had the motivation to finish the prototype early (trial period was only 30 days ).

Today, I was again looking for the alternatives and found – Pencil. No, I don’t mean the office aid, but the Pencil Project. It lacks some important features like creating hyper-links between the components and thus exporting to HTML pages, but these are planned and I can say that I really like this tool. And not to forget – it is open source! You can install it as a Firefox extension or download it as a standalone application. Unfortunately upstream tarball contains the whole XULRunner, so I decided to create a package for openSUSE. It is available from our Contrib repository and is only 330kB large! (Big thanks goes to Wolfgang Rosenauer for helping me to tame XULRunner.)

Pencil right now supports common shapes like rectangles or bitmaps, annotations, GTK widgets and Windows XP widgets. The widgets (or rather stencils) are simple SVG files, so if we help Duong Thanh An, the author, we might see Qt, iPhone or Yahoo stencils as a part of the Pencil in the future! Wouldn’t that be sweet?

Update: I just found Graffletopia – with hundreds of stencils (or so-called graffles) for Mac OS X tool OmniGraffle and some of them are really great. How about a converter ?