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
I think that it would be cool to have SAL available as an activity in “traditional” plasma. This will probably also greatly boost the usage and testing of it.
Anyway uber cool work ^_^
you can already use SAL in any Plasma shell, such as plasma-desktop, though it takes a couple of steps. first, one has to adjust the .desktop file so that it appears in the desktop as well as the netbook shell. the other main issue is that the text entry widget which drives it is a separate widget, so you need to add that too, at least right now (we’re discussing changing how the text entry works right now, actually)
but shouldn’t be too big a problem to eventually make it easily usable from plasma-desktop. it just isn’t the main motivation at the moment.
I’ve been asked by three different friends to do Linux installs for them on netbooks, and now my wife has purchased one. In each case, I did go with KDE 4.x, but did not bother trying to go with the netbook containment/shell yet. Early mockups seemed to focus entirely on sticky notes on a huge clock.
What I want from a netbook shell is something akin to a iGoogle page, Opera speed-dial, or Chrome’s start page. I want to quickly discover personalized web content.
RSS feeds, IM/contacts, PIM/calendar, and email should be at the forefront. In an ideal world, this would pass the grandma test. Look speed-dial, or Chrome’s start page, it either automatically configures itself to display the RSS feeda and activities you most frequent, unless of course you override it to lock in your preferences for what to display.
It should also change focus and discover activities. For instance, if you plug in a digital camera, instead of a pop-up asking you if you want to download the pics with Digikam, a section of the “newspaper” should itself change to reflect that you plugged in the camera with intent to access it.
The same should go with syncing mobile phones/PDAs, or your music player.
And if KDE really wants to be usable on netbooks and MIDs, KDE needs a tighter streamlined widget style, with a corresponding plasma theme.
@T. J. Brumfield: yes, what you said is more or less the idea. Now the work is more concentrated on doing a working external shell, even the default set of widgets in the newspaper has not been decided yet