Tag Archives: tablet

Towards a declarative Plasma: Containments and tablets

Software

In the KDE Plasma Workspace 4.6 there was for the first time the possibility to write Plasmoids completely with a mix of the QML declarative language and Javascript, part of QtQUICK, this makes development dramatically faster (and with dramatically I mean that in around 2 days, c++ plasmoids developed since 4.0 can been rewritten from scratch)

Now, for 4.7 we are increasing even more the capabilities of the QML script engine, with the target of being able to write any kind of complex user interface with the QML/JavaScript languages in conjunction with the Plasma API.

The last addition is declarative containments:

In the Plasma workspaces, the activities are represented by spaces for the widgets, that can be very different, just think about how different they are the appearances and layouts of the Plasma Desktop shell, the Netbook and the Mobile ones.

3 Plasma form factors

The way in which the Plasma widgets UI components are loaded, shown and managed is quite important for the final user experience of a particular device, and has to be pretty specific and tailored to the particular form factor.

On the desktop shell, everything on the desktop it’s information always with you, wispered in the background, where everything is freely positioned and resized (also due to the large space available)

On the netbook, we have a different use case and a different hardware: a free layout wouldn’t work there because of the screen real estate, and because a desktop would be almost never visible there, so all the information is in a big scrollable page, that can be brought any time in front of all the other windows.

In the mobile/handheld shell, the same concept is brought even further: the widgets can zoom to full screen, having two modes, a non interagible, reduced view, to a zoomed, interactive mode, due to the extreme small size of the screen.

Now what’s missing? lately the tablet form factor is exploding, that means the need for an ui adapt to a 7-8 inches touch screen without keyboard.

On a such form factor, the approach of zooming to full screen followed by the handheld shell wouldn’t be optimal, but we had another idea there.

A first prototype of the idea we developed now was already seen in a prototype based on the netbook shell and newspaper containment in 2009. The tecnique for managing the widget was later chosen as well from the MeeGo tablet UX, even if the approach on the widget themselves is radically different (here there is a fixed set of widget that represents the main kind of media the device can handle, like pixctures, music and video)

This has now been rewritten as a stand alone containment completely in QML (with the code size a fraction of the original)

A video of a preliminar version can be seen here.

OGG version

The goal there is to show to the user a quick glance of all the data the user usually works with in all the activities (yes, that word again;) he does usually with the device, with the possibilities to expand all those little previews in a proper full screen touch friendly application.

In this video you can see as well other new things that I still didn’t write about… that’s for the next time, stay tuned 😉

Converging minds

Software

Sometimes when times are ready some ideas really want to come up and be used

Without calling the examples in the history of science, that is quite a bit exagerated here, in the recent history of computing, at all levels from low level stuff to the UI.

this happened over and over again, because of advancement in hardware that makes something possible, because a certain fraework matured enough, because some projects take inspiration from another one, maybe with changes that may improve over the original one or may get it worse (that’s all about the evolution in nature is btw) or some times they just pop out in the same moment even if one doesn’t really know about each others work.

As a result, the evolution follows very similar steps on several quite different platform.

I’ve tought about it quite a lot when i seen this video:

(no, don’t have other formats since that video isn’t mine)

This is a preview video of the user interface intended for the MeeGo distribution to run on tablet devices. The main “primary” UI shows two “pages”, one is a grid of icons with an optional search field that has been seen in several places already, from the very very old mobile devices such as the first Palms to things like The iPhone or the Plasma Netbook Search and Launch interface (where our search functionality is quite more powerful than just searching applications to launch)

The second interesting “page” is a space where is possible to have widgets that connects to webservices, list your media files, PIM data etc.. does this ring a bell?

This is quite similar to the netbook “Newspaper” ui, there is quite different, instead of being two columns that scrolls vertically, it’s one single row that scrolls horizontally, because when you have only touch as input, it’s indeed a way to use it quite more convenient.

Now, what’s interesting, that in prevision of adapting pieces of the netbook ui on devices like tablets, there is an hidden mode in the netbook ui that permits exactly this behaviour. In not suspect times (November 2009) i did shot a screencast that shown also that feature among other things (go to 2:39 to see it):

OGG version

Yes, it’s quite funny to see this video now, since the project came quite a long way in the meantime and so it works way more smootly, but it shows the idea already basically working.

In KDE SC 4.5 the newspaper ui as well the other components received quite some love, so now the general usage feels much more smooth, even this hidden just-a-little-experimental feature of the newspaper, so for today I’m leaving you with a brand new video of this kind of interface as is in today’s trunk (and SC 4.5) running on the usual low powered VIA tablet:

OGG version

Oh, almost forgetting, of course:

I'm going to Akademy

Plasma Netbook 4.5

Software

So, it was pretty a long time since the last time I blogged about the KDE Plasma Netbook project… what’s going on on that? you wanna videos?, you’ll get videos 🙂

This doesn’t mean it’s stopped. Au contraire my friends, since 4.4, many of its parts were rethought and redesigned. Some of those changes are quite visible at a UI level, some other are more under the hood, but contribute to give to it a more “finished” look and feel to it.

Alongside KDE SC 4.4 the first version of the Netbook Shell was released, and while it was a really big achievement for us it was still at a really early stage: it had to be released (early and often, they say :)) but now things begin to really get serious.

We made a step back and looked at it, asked ourselves where we want it to go and what purpose it will have to serve (in brief: developer sprints are very, very useful :p)

When we started the project Netbooks were a certain defined thing: underpowered device (low price, weight and power consumption), compact size (high portability) and a very targeted use case: they are mostly Internet devices, or a platform to run very simple applications, so more of a secondary machine for casual use rather that a proper laptop.

In the meantime they have changed, they are more near to a laptop, with bigger (but not actually big) screens and almost normal hard drives.

So, they really have changed so much? yes and no. We can’t afford for this reason to be “less careful” to issues like screen size or power consumption, because despite how it could look, they still continue to be quite different beasts compared to laptops.

Computing power issues aren’t going to go away anytime soon, and even if tomorrow morning netbooks will have a resolution of 1920×1080 or 3 times more, 10 inches are going to remain 10 inches: your eyes don’t zoom.

So, what we will see in this area in the future?

  • More diversification: bigger screen with Atom and smaller screens with ARM (will it actually happen? I hope so)
  • More original devices: clamshell notebook-like as usual, opposed to tablet form factors: so two totally different types of user interfaces will be needed, right? Well, the world could be more complex (and interesting) that that.
  • So, there will be more kinds of devices, some of them will be addressed by Plasma Netbook, some of them by Plasma Mobile.

So, after thinking about it for a moment the natural process is to pass from the tough that this was not as different of our every day computing as we thought to the certainly that the challenges that will be faced will be way more than ever thought.

So, let’s not be so far-fetched and let’s see what are the new shiny things that will ship in KDE Plasma Netbook Shell 4.5.

Faster. Several optimizations have been done on the shell itself and on the Search and Launch activity, (alongside the continuous optimization work it is being done in Qt, especially on the QGraphicsView features we put on a pretty tough stress test:)) Now the general usage and feeling should be a lot snappier and responsive.

Search and Launch. It uses a different way to fetch the data used in the menus, so they should be a lot more accurate now.

Moreover, extensive drag and drop support has been added. This makes it more intuitive to use and more friendly on a touch screen device. On the video below you can see it used on a normal netbook, on the usual 800MHz little tablet with Moblin and on a bigger tablet with an 1GHz Via processor (note here the video driver is the plain old vesa but it’s running pretty decently anyways). 3 completely different devices, same UI, of which some elements are starting to translate very well across all three, some of them still not, and here is where the extremely modular architecture of Plasma comes to its full power. just replace the little elements that interaction wise are device specific.

Last but not least you can see there also that many of the layout and behavior rough edges that were previously in the icon view have been solved.

OGG version

Newspaper. The main information hub of Plasma-netbook, shown in the video below. As all the Plasma “flickable” scroll areas, uses brand new code (by our very best graphics ninja, actually 😉 to handle the touch and the flicking in a much better way.

Now,to improve both the looks and the usability of it, the widgets appear perfectly aligned in a 2×2 grid (it’s still possible to have as many columns and rows as we want by the way). By interacting on a widget, it will expand to take up to the whole screen height, so offering a “maximized” view of it, that reflects the concept that now your attention is on that particular one (so, trascuring for a while the other ones, albeit still reachable)

the page can behave like this or all the widgets can be “maximized” like before, eliminating all the internal scrolling areas leaving only the big external one. this will probably be the preferred behavior on touch screens.

OGG version

Other than that, there is the quite important addition of javascript support I talked about in the last entry: it will make personalization (by distributors and in the future directly by users as well) very very easy.