Work on Plasma Mobile continues.
Bit after bit all the pieces come together: what’s impressing is how much the Plasma framework we have built into years is paying now.
Plasma Mobile still lacked a widget explorer: the particular formfactor really required a custom one since the one used in the desktop has a pretty different usage pattern and is targeted at a really different form factor (here we are targetting -really- small screen sizes).
I was expecting that writing one could take a quite long amount of time, after all getting there the firt time taken a fair amount of work…
I couldn’t have been more wrong. In less than two days I have now a working widget explorer, that works pretty well on small touch screens, using a mix of QML, Plasma Widgets and C++ models
The main interface is a big flicking icon grid, with a side panel that shows detailed informations on the widget (that can be scrolled with the finger as well).
To add a new widget into the screen, just click at the “+” icon positioned where the widget will be. Interaction wise is way simpler than the Plasma Desktop mechanism, because of both precision of the input device (where with device I mean a fat finger :p) and of screen size (where with size i mean actual phisical size, not pixel resolution)
This little video shows it in action on the usual device. ah, and a curiosity, at some point you see the screen switches to an activity with a big numeric keypad.. that’s not a mockup, as Artur announced during Akademy, if it runs on a N900 phone, that can do actual phone calls.
Wow, looking really good! The interface looks really smooth, I wish my phone worked like that.
Out of curiosity, what is the wallpaper you are using there?
Wow, Marco, that is awesome! Apart from the general Shiny Goodness that is Plasma, the interaction methods you folks are putting into Plasma-Mobile are looking *really* slick. The widget explorer fits into that as well – it looks simple to use.
A question, though: Is the number of widgets shown at a time configurable somehow, or is it hard-coded? Also, (slightly OT) it’s hard to tell in this video how the kinetic scrolling of the desktop behaves. Does it snap to each set of widgets?
I must admit that I’m not really a fan of plasma-netbook but I do like plasma-mobile a lot. I really wish I had an N900 with maemo or meego so I can run plasma-mobile in it.
Keep up with the good work
The number of widgets depends how many can fit given the minimum size of the widget (each individual widget knows what it is), will probably become more flexible, but would be hard to fit more han two in that screen resolution/dpi, they would overlap.
And yes, the scrolling snaps, to not show 4 half cutted widgets