Tag Archives: netbook

Netbook, Pages and what they’re for

Software

As presented on this blog a bit ago the central and more important view for Plasma Netbook Shell is this so called “Newspaper” activity: applets are positioned in an arbitrary number of columns (default two), one on top of the other, scrolling when there isn’t enough space, giving you actually an “almost infinite” vertical real estate

At the beginning this was decide just for a screen size issue, but with time this has been revealed to be a damn good metaphor that could have been expanded, so let’s see what the direction is.

As said pretty much over the place, the “netbook” is not a little laptop is a totally new class of device, that is kinda inept to do what the computer has been used for ages, create content.

The shift we are seeing now, is a shift on using the computer to create content only in certain moments (i.e. work ;p) and most of the time just “consuming” content or creating only really lightweight type of content (hello microblogging).

A different beast, a different use

This is what has been called (and somewhat mistaken for) the shift towards the web based content, but is not just limited to that, the web is just the pipe to convey this content and often the web browser is a kind of a suboptimal tool to access some kinds of that content, but this is another story.

The netbook is the perfect device for a quick check of that content when you are on the move, or not want or have the possibility to use a bigger but sometime inconvenient computer.

Now, there is something that needs full focus of the attention of the user ad of the machine, like reading a big article on a website or watching a movie, and there is something that instead most of the times needs a quick “peek” at it to see if there is something changed, and -maybe- only in this case I’ll give full attention on that task, like:

microblogging: what my friends are saying? or just update your status with a line or two of text.

Facebook or sites like that: often just used as microblogging, if i need some more advanced features of the website i will give full attention to it

Weather: often all is needed is just a quick answer: will it rain tomorrow?

Email: at start just want to see the titles of the few last emails, only if there is something that looks important i will give the attention to emails right now.

There are other examples, like appointments, to-do lists and similar things.

The concept of giving “full attention” is indicated in plasma by that little “full screen” icon i talked about here, this is available both in the usual plasma desktop and in the scrolling page layout of the netbook. this button will launch an application, like akregator for the news widget and gwenview for the picture frame or just open the a web browser to the proper URL in the case of services like remember the milk or the weather.

Pages and activities

The concept of the newspaper is perfect for that, it contains widgets that will give this quick “peek” on the possible information sources one could be interested on the internet, giving a quick idea, as soon as the device is turned on on what could be interesting/important and what definitely won’t be.

This video gives a typical work flow of the netbook Plasma interfaces: it shows how is easy to add and remove “pages” and organize widgets in them, keeping the concept of “activity” that was introduced in the plasma desktop, so one could have a page that informs on what’s going on in several social networking sites, or showing some news from rss sources and so on, having another page activity that is more work oriented perhaps showing appointments and work related emails (widgets for emails and appointments still won’t be available in KDE SC 4.4, but they are in the works)

OGG version

Web client widgets

Here you can see some widgets that can attach to web services: the microblogging client, the 3 opendesktop plasmoids, and the Remember the milk client

network widgets

The first thing one can notice is how they look very similar, they’re pretty good at their task and some guidelines on how to do a widget like that can be extrapolated:

  • You may want to follow this look and behavior when the service you want to connect offers a list of “stuff” that can always be interesting to give to the user, such as microblogs, news items, friend list, email messages, whatever.
  • This list should be presented as occupying the total or nearly total area of the plasmoid (maximizing the content, minimizing the “chrome”)
  • don’t make assumptions on how big the widget will be, test it from a very small size (always think to run your widget in a cellphone and ask yourself if it would look usable in there), to very big
  • when there isn’t enough space, make it scroll the content, some UI elements (like the input field of the microblog applet) are in fact less important than the content, so shouldn’t be always visible stealing from the content, you may want them to scroll away as well
  • make it work in the panel, so in 90% of the cases you may want show the content in a popup
  • Scrollbars nested in other scrollbars are not really good, so when embedded in the newspaper the widget should get longer to not have a scrollbar (well if it won’t become -exaggeratedly- long)

Some of those points, like scrolling, automate resize and panel-friendliness will be got almost for free using standard Plasma components, like Plasma::ScrollWidget and Plasma::PopupApplet

In the future I hope (is this a new year resolution? i don’t know :P) more and more of this kind of widgets will surface, with the procedure to create them more and more easy and automated when possible (and I also hope to see them written in the simple javascript bindings). This kind of widgets will also be the key to start to colonize new type of devices, from cellphone like tiny things to 10 foot interfaces like mediacenters

Ah, by the way, hopefully

I'm going to Camp KDE 2010!

Where I will give a talk about all this stuff ๐Ÿ˜€

Another Plasma netbook screencast

Software

Another screencast of yours truly: this shows the Plasma netbook shell running on a bog standard Asus EeePc 1005Ha.

It can be seen the new neat animations of the search and launch interface when results are loaded. What’s neat is that it seems to run quite well on this pretty basic hardware and animations are just as smooth as they should be ๐Ÿ™‚

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Kubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10

BlaBla

So today Kubuntu 9.10 was released. I wish to the whole team my congratulations for the release ๐Ÿ˜€

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 ๐Ÿ™‚

Search and Launch improvements

Software

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?

BlaBla

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

Software

*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 ๐Ÿ˜€

*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 ๐Ÿ˜€

Trying the netbook project made easy

Software

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

New features in the newspaper activity

Software

Another update on the Plasma netbook project: in this little video i’ll show the last improvements of the so called newspaper activity, little things that however have all their own place in the big picture:

  • Slightly different look, the wallpaper is more visible and there are less margins
  • Widgets have titlebars, that shows the widget name as well 3 buttons: the close button, configure and the new associated application launcher i presented the last time (it has been designed with the netbook shell in mind)
  • Some days ago, Adenilson and Igor came up with a really nice patch to animate the scrolling widgets used by Plasma: now everything that uses it, from the newspaper activity to the microblogging plasmoid automatically got a way more smooth and organic look and feel, hats off to them
  • Is now possible to create and delete newspaper activities, to have as much “pages” as one likes, selectable by the top toolbar

In this video it’s also possible to see more changes, both in the panel and in the Search and Lauch activity, but this is for the next time! (i love teasing people ๐Ÿ™‚


OGG version

As usual, the screencasting appliation has a pretty poor refresh rate and pretty bad refresh problems, to this does not actually reflect 100% the real thing:)

Netbook shell after Tokamak 3

Software

Here we go with the long promised screencast about the progress of the Plasma Netbook shell after Tokamak. This time I’ve tried to record an audio track as well: the process is still not very well streamlined so the quality is still so so (composite+screencast still seems a big nono these days) and yeah, bear with my english, it’s what it is, like a certain Nintendo character :p

Aaanyways the stuff I talk about in this video is:

  • How to try it if you have a svn trunk build
  • Keyboard and touch screen navigation
  • New background dialog
  • Integration with the new widgets explorer

Where the last two are true for the Plasma desktop in general, thanks to the work of Davide and Ana respectively at Tokamak 3.


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Tokamak netbook talk

BlaBla

This post is an attempt to make a little synopsis of the stuff i talked in my tiny presentation about the Plasma Netbook project, nothing new but a nice recall.

The plasma netbook shell idea was born during Akademy 2008 in Belgium on a blackboard (yeah, real old blackboard with dusty chalk :p) and remained mostly on the blackboard for quite some time.

However the first pieces were put in place shortly after by Aaron doing a first implementation of the plasma shell, that languished there for a while.

Fast forward until some months ago, me and Arthur decided to put some time in it, so let’s see the results so far.

As plasma being really modular, we now have a collection of stuff pretty much independent suff.

  • A plasma app: we don’t use the plasmadesktop executable but something that is lighter, simpler and allows us to experiment very un-desktop things

We have some own containments too:

  • We don’t use the normal desktop and panel in plasma-desktop since it has too many things not really useful there: logics for autohide panels panel alignment and things like that
  • Newspaper containment. A free layout is not adapt in a constrained size, let’s put a bit of order.
  • Search and launch. Let’s have an easy and intuitive way to launch applications and do searches, without monopolizing the whole ui.

Just two applets right now:

  • A search box separate from the sal, to be positioned in the panel
  • a simple titlebar/semi-taskbar, since we won’t have neither of those

We can ask ourselves since we have a really good desktop: why we do a different thing?
A traditional desktop has some characteristics that makes it really good on big screen resolutions since we can tile multiple windows in the same screen or leave a big emty area to access the desktop.

However on a small screen the very concept of havin windows become annoying, because the space is barely enough and sometimes even too scarce for the actual application data. This Should drive us to a radical rethinking of how the shell should look like and behave and is also an occasion for us to have new ideas and touch things that in a desktop we really can’t.

So what we have that is so odd? We don’t have a desktop containment, we don’t have a taskbar, a titlebar of the windows or resizable windows.

A peculiarity of the shell is that the main view, what usually would be a “desktop” is a normal window like the others, so is possible to put it in front and choose it in the “taskbar” (that is just the present windows effect) and in alt+tab, also all the panel configuration machinery is not present in the shell.

What is really interesting of the project are the two new containments.

The newspaper: the idea is to make look like a newspaper, act like a newspaper, so it’s a duck..

This is what you see as soon as the system start: a two column layout of widgets that are network-oriented, so they gives you a quick overview of what happens in the interwebs and on what your friends are up to.

The Search and Launch interface: from personal experience i see that new users are simply amazed by krunner when you show it to them, but they rarely use it, because it’s really well-hidden under a shortcut and there is nothing advertising it. On the other hand the SAL interface brings krunner up as the first and only way to launch applications (or execute any other kind of search and action supported by krunner, from evaluating numerical expressions to searching wikipedia)
the search box is in the panel, so it’s reachable even when the sal containment is hidden by windows or is not in the main view.

There were interesting reactions so far. The comments about the newspaper and the sal were overwhelmingly positive, way more tat i expected, that says we have to be doing something right :p. Not so positive are the comments about the panel, i think tere are some valid points and i am not really happy about too, there is certainly room for improvement.

Now, the work still to is still huuuge (everyone willing to give an hand is of course more than welcome):

  • Refine the applets and containments: better fallback in the case desktop composite is not available.
    Improve panel behavior
  • Friendliness to keyboard navigation
  • Integration with kwin: how to do and behaviour of the fullscreen applications
  • Seamless switch between a plasma-desktop and a plasma-netbook session
  • Make really smooth to use certain plasmoids as stand alone applications