This is a follow up of another good news that recently appeared on PlanetKDE.
Friday a new project within KDE was announced: Plasma Active. We explained that wasn’t a single project, but more an umbrella of many components, all of them are a piece that we think necessary to reach our goad of a creating a desirable user experience encompassing a spectrum of devices (and remember the date 09.10.11, just saying)
Today we are happy to announce another project that will be a pretty important piece of the puzzle: Contour
The problem
If we want to build a desiderable experience on devices, we have to look around on existing offerings to look not only for what we like, but also for what we don’t like.
What is the common factor of today’s tablet and handheld operating systems?
The center of how they work, are applications, so called apps (why trying to give a new word to a concept at least 40 years old still escapes me btw).
All the tasks that you can accomplish with the device are delegated to a single application (that maybe isn’t enough to do exactly what you want). That’s really a model not much different compared to the desktop one.
Now, having a different entity, with specialized logic and specialized ui to accomplish a particular task is a good thing, but the current problem is the lack of integration among them, especially on the mobile world
On the desktop side, in KDE we are doing pretty good integration wise, can we do as good in the mobile front?
And with integration I don’t mean (only) look and feel. This is important as well as there are also valid use cases to break it in some particular situations.
Contour
This new project is born from the collaboration between several KDE people, the Plasma and Nepomuk project, Basyskom and Open-slx, you can see a first concept video of the new shell here:
Right now I just want to present this user interaction prototype, then we’ll talk more about the actual details behind it, both UI-wise and what is the technology making it possible.
What I’m talking about is all the applications being deeply integrated in the workspace, for certain things there should be rally a central place, from which both workspace and applications could tap:
- What I’m doing right now with my device? (yes, activities again!)
- What kind of resources are now open? (can be files, contacts, urls, whatever)
- What kind of resources are relevant to this activity? (so that i can get very quickly just to them, without having to worry about complex menus and submenus)
- Somewhat related example on the above point: I don’t want 3 apps and the workspace having 4 different concepts and storage for “Bookmarks” for instance.
- What kind of resources could be relevant to this activity? or what actions could be important? (could be publish this photo, answer this email, feed the fish, whatever 🙂
Now, In the last years of development in KDE, we have almost all the needed technology to do all of the mentioned points, just think about Activities, taking a more definite shape in 4.6, resource and ontology storage in Nepomuk, central PIM data storage in Akonadi…
It’s just somewhat harder to do on a desktop since here there are quite a lot of legacy constraints and a long “genetic memory” of the last 30 years that makes really hard for new paradigms to emerge, however I’m sure we’ll gradually get into it there as well 🙂
Mobile systems are still a white canvas where we still can experiment something new, and provided we have most of the technology for it, we’ll be able to have this resource centric, activity based system in a pretty good shape in a really short time.
Plasma Active
So how does it relate to Plasma Active and the current tablet user interface?
Contour is an experimental user interface based on Plasma, that does an heavy usage of Nepomuk and won’t be intended for everyday usage at first, but…
As the rest of KDE and Plasma as well, Contour is designed to be highly modular, so as soon as a part of it gets “ready”, the main Plasma Tablet user interface will immediately adopt it (and eventual other Active workspaces that will surface later).
This is some very cool stuf you are all working on. Don’t forget to put your promo team into gear and also annouce it on MeeGo forums and mailing lists so that people know about it.
Very nice gui, I really like what you’re trying to do but what about the desktop?
This philosophy would work just as good in there, The best would be 1 core for every app(image viewer, video player), an specific qml gui for each form factor (desktop, tablet, mobile)
As every gui should be redone(should this be called KDE5?) maybe this is a good chance to make guis more consist, right now for example there are a lot of different ways of handling a no-menubar app, there should be 1 and make it standard, if it is menu button in toolbar or in window bar, or global menu, it’s another subject, but it should be standard, as standard as the normal menubar has always been.
Settings and help should always be on the same place, and if apps start to do so much own design for guis without menubar, this will be hard.
PD: Sorry if I went a bit offtopic with the menubar.
This is really stunning! While some of these things were known, I had no idea how far the whole concept went and how far the project has come. I am really looking forward to reading more on this!
Cheers!
Hopefully, the whole thing will be very modular.
and as we will move every little component in the “release” Plasma tablet as soon as possible, we hope to use it on the desktop as well.
For instance the Activities system is the one of the desktop: an improvement made for Contour will be available in the desktop as well
The recommendation system will be a daemon, that can run just anywhere, what is needed is an ui for it. so nothing will stop from
a) using the same plasmoid in the desktop
b) writing a desktop specific UI for it
same discourse for all the other components
As other people have commented before, I thought this is only at conceptual level. I had no idea you people already have prototypes. This is really great work. Though I dont like the fact that every demo about qt quick and technologies these days focuses on flicks and kinetic scrolling.
It would be nice if these things work across devices. In a way where the context not only encompasses what I am doing on this device but also which device I am on and what I may need there. In some cases what all has happened on other devices(say my phone) since I last used them.
share more about this kind stuf, like it…