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):
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:
Oh, almost forgetting, of course:
but why plasma is still so slow? You should focus more on performance, for most people a laggy UI is just ugly no matter how advanced and powerful it is
> Sometimes when times are ready some ideas really want to come up and be used
I applaud for your acceptance of these things! Pretty impressive, as that MeeGo interface looks waay too much like plasma
Would be nice to always use .ogv for ‘ogg’ videos.
Results in much a better user experience when you click in links 😉
Plasma isn’t slow on my computer
In the last video isn’t slow as well
Where do you experience this performance problem?