Plasma Active resource browser

Software

Sadly I didn’t have much time to blog lately, but luckily today i found some time to do a screencast like the good ol’ times.

What’s shown here is an application that will be pretty central in Plasma Active 3: it’s a file browser (or a Resource browser, it can actualy be about much more than files). Basically this will be the central point to manipulate stuff in Plasma Active.

You can browse all the resources by type, by date, with a timeline representation which can have a zoomed level of detail, so browse by year, by month, by day.

You can select files with a two fingers gesture and then via drag and drop you can move them between the internal storage and a removable device such as a microsd, delete them, or tag them (think about the Google+ circles ui)

OGG version

The ui is all built using the Plasma QML components, keeping a coherent look&feel with everything else, the general feeling of the ui is aiming to be quite natural, with animated, and real-material feeling surfaces, with a plausible phisical disposition, like the main area that can partly slide in/out to reveal the contents hidden under it, namely the sidebar of controls such as tags and timeline.
But yet is not trying too hard to mock some real object: mobile uis that have things like a wood texture background really go too far and besides being completely incoherent one to another,

10 thoughts on “Plasma Active resource browser

  1. Djuro Drljaca

    Is this WeTab? Will we finally get multi touch capability on it with PA3?

    Can’t really comment on this resource browser withoud testing it in RL … but currently I still prefer the old school way of browsing files 😛

    Reply
  2. dyrvere

    Just wanna say it’s looking good, but the file-browsing gives a feeling of being slow while watching when compared with the smooth and fluid zooming. Is it just me or file manager still need optimizing? But good functionality all over! 🙂
    Anyways, that Plasma Active text and logo while being tired gives the hallucination of a extremely slight reflection shimmer running along the text. Looks cool.

    Reply
  3. Alejandro Nova

    Please, check the Microsoft mockups I posted in the forums! Music, Photos, Videos and the like must have their own KIO Slaves. And this interface is great also for Dolphin in 4.9. Please, backport!

    Reply
  4. Lionel Chauvin

    How the user can guess that he must drag and drop files on the + icon for add a tag ?
    I think it is a bad design.

    Reply
  5. Mark

    Hi,

    I’m really curious where the code is for this. I was also playing with the idea to make a QML file browser and started implementing some basic requirements for that by making qml component to list a directory that uses KIO::listDir internally.

    Cheers,
    Mark

    Reply
  6. Thomas Pfeiffer | Colomar

    As a member of the Plasma Active team, let me reply to some comments:

    @Mark, Alejandro: This is no actual file browser in the sense of browsing the directory hierarchy. Instead, it only runs Nepomuk queries. Our aim is to completely hide the file system from users and doing everything in Nepomuk instead. That’s also why it can be used to browse any kind of resource (including e.g. contacts, bookmarks, places, …). So this probably won’t be used for Dolphin, since it as a classical file browser.

    @Ste: I don’t know which system it runs on in the video, but it runs on every system that Plasma Active runs on (which includes Mer, Meego, openSUSE, but also e.g. Kubuntu and other distros)

    @Lionel: We will test with users if they understand that interaction. The upside is that e.g. moving between devices and tagging both work by consistently by dragging the resources. This may still change for the tagging if it feels unintuitive to users, though.

    @dyrvere This is a very early version which has not been optimized for performance yet afaik, so the final version will probably be faster.

    @Djuro: On Meego, Multitouch already works since PA2.

    Reply
  7. Mark

    That’s actually a nice idea. Abstract the filesystem away and just use resources 🙂

    I do wonder though.. How would such things work when you for example want to install something or download something.. Do you then download in a “resource” in which your download will be placed? The same for installing.

    Reply
  8. Marco Martin

    yeah, as thomas says, in general it uses only Nepomuk. However kio is used to browse removable devices. all is in the plasma-mobile repo, there is also a filesystem model that can be imported and used anywhere.

    Reply

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