Monthly Archives: October 2009

Kubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10

So today Kubuntu 9.10 was released. I wish to the whole team my congratulations for the release 😀

I want to sped two words about a new additin in the Ubuntu fleet: Kubuntu Netbook Remix. This particular version of Kubuntu ships (and uses as the default user interface) an early preview of what will be the Plasma Netbook project.

We (as both upstream KDE people and Kubuntu people) wanted to quickly put something out of the door, to give people an easy way to test it, and make it a bit more known before the final release, and requiring people to run trunk is not really reasonable, while a livecd poses a way lower entry barrier.

While you are testing it, please keep in mind is software in a really early stage of development.Kubuntu Karmic Koala of course uses KDE 4.3, because it’s what is out at the moment :). Since some months ago the Netbook project uses some important new features that will be in the Plasma library for KDE 4.4, so the version shipped in Kubuntu is a snapshot a bit older that what is in svn now (plus some backports of more recent fixes), that’s why it looks pretty different to the last screencasts i did.

So keep in mind that the “real deal” on Kubuntu will come just with 10.04 (or as soon as KDE 4.4 packages will be released), but I’m confident that what is shipped now is something already quite fun to use, and gives an idea how it will be, so try it, have fun 🙂

Search and Launch improvements

I’ve already talked about the search and launch activity for the netbook shell, so this video rather than explaining again what this is it just gives a brief description of what is changed on it and where the work is heading:

Some work has been done on keyboard navigation, on always giving the expected thing the keyboard focus.

A pretty iconview class has been written to be used in both the results and on the favourite icons on top, making it possible to scroll by “flicking” with the mouse or with the finger in both places, with many cute animations.

And of course tons and tons of fixes.

OGG version.

Netbook: what are you?

Some time ago Michael Dell said that netbooks delivers a really poor user experience. Now it’s pretty easy to infer that this is because netbooks sales are starting to erode the higher margins desktop and notebook markets, putting the manifacturers in a really difficult situation: one of the most successful type of device of all timesis killing the most expensive ones.

In the end Michael Dell is even right: as a general purpose pc they deliver a pretty poor user experience for both performance and screen real-estate, but this infortunate situation is in a great extent fault of hardware manifactures.

The first netbook attempt, the old EeePC 701 was pretty much a device on its own: it had an ad hoc user interface and it was clear that it served just a limited set of use cases, casual web browsing, audio/video consumption and things like that. Not entirely different from smartphones use case, but for situations when you can carry around a slightly bigger and more convenient to use device.

Then, seeing the fantastic amount of sales of those thinghies the hardware manifacturers figured out that if they put Windows XP and bigger hard drives on them they would have sold even better and this was totally true, to the point that people only want to buy netbooks instead of regular machines, rather than using them as a secondary companion device (bad economy, the easiest way to still get XP rather the much hated Vista, pick the reason you want).

This has taken away every bit of innovation those devices had, like a different operating syste, solid state drives and software specifically designed for those screen constraints: let’s just throw office on it, it will work perfectly no?

This situation is bad for users that are buying an hammer when they need a screwdriver and bad for vendors that are seeing their profits taken away.

I hope this will be taken as a lesson and manifacturers will learn to fear less to be innovative, rather than taking the path of least resilience. I’m hopeful that devices like the arm based ones, maybe with extensive use of the touch screen will make netbooks that really distincht and innovative class of devices that they deserve to be, rather than just slightly dumber laptops.

Random bits

*Arthur makes remote widgets work on the new Nokia N900: this has really awesome implications. Rob’s work on remote widgets is really cool by itself, and if you add the possibility of exporting widgets on a small device like that it opens the doors to really cool applications, think about a really rich remote controller for your mediacenter, a way for a conference speaker to publish his slides or something related to the attendees regardless the device they’re using, a way for a teacher to control what is available in a computer lab room desktops and stuff we still did not tought about.

*KDE depends on Qt 4.6. This opens the door for us to the use of all the cool new features of this release, a thing we were drooling about since quite some time is the new animation framework. A summer of code project was done to make a really easy to use API to access it from Plasma, to have a library of stock effects that will be coherent across all the widgets. It has been merged into trunk now and when it will be put really in use expect to see fireworks 😀

*Work on the netbook interface continues, we got a pretty nice workflow model for using the newspaper activity, plus the Search and launch activity changed quite a lot since the last screencast. I should reeeally do a couple of new ones, so stay tuned 😀

New job

A new quite interesting chapter of my life is started since quite some time, I didn’t want to say too much about it until everything was settled down and up to speed. But now i guess the time has come, let me introduce my new employer, a pretty familiar and constant presence in the KDE development:

Thanks to the generous support of those people, these days known as Qt Development Frameworks (and the mother company Nokia of course), I’ll be sponsored to work full time on KDE, in particular on the Plasma libraries and shells, especially the Plasma netbook project, that is taking up shape quite nicely. Plus there will be another quite cool Qt-related project

I will remain based here in Italy, but especially starting from next year perhaps it would be more probable to see me wandering around conferences around the world, we’ll see 🙂

What i can say: Qt Development Frameworks (or: our little old dear trolls) rocks!

New hosting

Today I’ve moved the site hosting to a new provider. It should be way better than the old uber-cheap one. Transition gone pretty well, but the site has been kinda broken for some hours, now all should be back normal again.

I hope to not have lost comments during the DNS transition time.

Trying the netbook project made easy

Since two days there is a new module in systemsettings: workspace under the Desktop category.

Here is possible to switch between the Plasma desktop shell and the netbook shell. the switch will be done on the fly (no need to restart KDE) and it will be remembered the next KDE start.

Plasma desktop will close, Plasma netbook will start and some different settings on KWin will be applied: windows will start as maximized and there will be no border for maximized windows.

The other section is Dashboard: is now possible to configure from here if you want the dashboard with the same content of your desktop or if you want it to show an independent set of widgets.

In the same way, in the Multiple desktops section, is now possible to decide if you want a different plasma activity for each desktop, so the quite hidden config dialog reachable from the zoom interface for those two options has been removed.

Mart

Tale of a little pixel