Memory is starting to be fuzzy already, so, since i promised a blog about the same topics on my talk about the netbook, here it is, mostly because the netbook project (but more important its implications in helping Plasma being ported and be optimized for a long spectrum of devices) has really soft spot in my hearth.

We started from the most familiar non-desktop platform: The netbooks, but…

Aren’t netbooks just underpowered little laptops? Indeed today are sold like that, with just still XP or Windows 7 preinstalled, but that’s the reason the interest in them is decreased recently. they are just not good general purpose machines.

But, they are pretty good as devices that can be used on the move to look at online content such as news, emails or social networks, and ultimately as a communication tool, rather that a content production workstation.

KDE SC and Plasma:why?

We still hear again and again that KDE is to heavy and too bloated to run on any modest hardware. Of course technically the situation can be improved and it will, for instance the platform profiles that are being cooked right now will be able to provide a law fat (as in Kevin words 🙂 you will find information about that in the upcoming future on the planet.

n the other hand, complaints are often not completely true, we need better communication about what the advantages of a KDE based solution are, and where the problems are: we pushes the edges of what all the layers of our platform can do, Being Qt, X, or graphics drivers, due to our hard beating the quality of the whole stack is really increasing (and this funningly enough is benefiting non KDE users as well).

About Plasma, it’s the primary UI on desktop, can be on completely different devices too?

Yes, because the Plasma library was designed with no assumptions on a particular form factor in mind. We started from netbooks to taste the waters, because was the less alien one and because we can provide a rich and complete user experience from day one.

What do you want?

Why Plasma can be good on a netbook, on a mediacenter, on a mobile phone?
because it can give people what they want, both to users that actually get to use it and developers, that want to create the most wonderful application in the world with it.

Users

So what users want? they want something useful. Now “useful” can mean different things in different form factors. On a netbook, and even more so on tablets and smartphones, is to be efficient instruments of communication and content fetching, perfect web clients, better than even just a browser.

They want to feel in control: the day for instance the facebook interface will change without them being able to choose they will get pissed, with rich clients there is always a slightly bigger degree of choice.

They want also something beautiful: between two systems that “just work” they will choose the one they find more aesthetically pleasing, even if it’s not technically the best, it’s irrational but it’s the human nature.

Developers

They want a powerful framework to build powerful applications as quickly as possible, Plasma offers a series of common components that makes the life of developers as easy as possible.

Plasma is heavily based on a strong separation between data and the visualization.

Everything in plasma is a plugin the data plugins are Data

Everything you see in Plasma is based on Svg, it’s theme engine makes easy to customize a potentially resolution independent widget set while maintaining pixel perfection.

Its widget set is based on QGraphicsView, like the other Qt widget sets conceived for the mobile, and is possible to integrate and use it together with them.

We have also a flick able scroll widget as well a flick able QtWebkit based one, that is very important, since the future on more and more devices is the touchscreen.

Plasmoids (or plasma widget, more generally), everything you see in a Plasma environment is one of those plugins. they can be specific for a certain formfactor, like kickoff or the taskbar, or they can be quite flexible, like the microblogging plasmoid.

They are done to work well in the desktop, panel, the netbook newspaper, as standalone little windows invoked from krunner (new from 4.5).

So, what about the netbook again?

First thing:window management: the desktop metaphor doesn’t work very well there…

KWin behaves slightly differently there, windows are maximized by default, maximize windows don’t have borders, and the panel is auto hide by default, so quite a lot of pixels are saved for the app

The boundary between primary UI and applications becomes blurred when some of the content can be fetched directly from the desktop, so it becomes a normal window like an application.

Search and Launch

After some usability tests done at Indt last year, what emerged is that Search is more intuitive than browsing trough many items in categories and subcategories. Search and launch uses all the search plugins of KRunner, even if is a completely different UI.

There is still a menu, but it’s flat, doesn’t have tree structure, that doesn’t work well on the human brain.

Of course uses flicking widgets and has an extensive support of drag and drop, that makes quite convenient to use it a mouse or even a stylus.

Netbook: Newspaper

Also the main widget view for the netbook is based on flicking widgets, this gives an infinite vertical space for our widgets, because the free layout of a desktop isn’t space-efficient enough for a small screen, so a layout that can be “browsed” like exactly an actual newspaper, feels more natural there.

Future

What the future reserves us? We need more widgets, especially PIM related, to make the “newspaper” really useful, a GSoc project is helping in this.

Also, the dataengines needs to cache their data for when the network connection is not available, there is a GSoc project working on this too.

Last two points, we need to expand on other devices, because I think netbooks won’t stay the way they are today, they will probably not converge with tablets, but for sure be strongly influenced by them, or become something even different.

Last but not least, the newspaper concept spawned some unintended at first but really interesting developments: two GSoc projects around Kontact and Skrooge, as well some work on KDevelop to provide a “dashboard” of useful widgets in standard desktop applications.