As said by the title of my last post, one of the things that we are trying to do with Active is “humanizing electrons”… make devices behave how people think instead of making people think like the implementation details behave.

To do that, it is necessary to phase out or better, demote and have in a less prominent way some of the concepts that always been with us, but not because they were good, because for tone technical reason or another 20 years ago we were forced to do this way.

Here we aren’t forced to follow the legacy, and the acquired skills that limit what can be changed on the desktop, on this kind of devices we have almost no legacy. (don’t worry, there won’t be a fresh start in the desktop, only continuous evolutionary changes)

• Why I have to care what is a “file” and what it isn’t aren’t pieces of information all the same? i couldn’t care less if a contact or a bookmark are stored in a different way than a pdf.
• Why I have to organize my things in a weird tree structure, data type that in the human brain simply doesn’t compute?
• Why I see arcane names like /usr, /etc and /dev that are simply pointless in my day to day work?
• Why if i subdivide my files by project, a file can’t be in two projects unless i do a copy that will go out of sync?
• I want to be able to annotate every thing, to be able to remind me what this is about and why is there (informations that would be unwanted in the file itself tough)
• Why if the mail application has informations about a contact, this information is buried in this application and everything else can’t have it?

This list could go on for many more points, but i think the concept is clear: while tools like the filesystem are awesome if well used, but aren’t enough anymore for the amount of data nowdays (yes i know, there will always be people that won’t need this, but this is true for any tool in existence).

In Plasma Active we base our graphical representation as much as possible on activities and on what “things” belong to an activity.

We try to make as less difference as possible between what is a file and what it isn’t.

This was only possible because one of the pillars of KDE: Nepomuk.

Nepomuk provides a metadata storage that is abstract enough to do almost everything you please with it. Everything can be a resource: being files, contacts, urls, places or activities. And everything can be related to everything, and here we have things related to activities, or between themselves (who sent to me this file as attachment?)

Sadly, in the desktop is still not used much, apart some pieces of ui to expose its features here and there (good news, getting better here too), but as Plasma Active shows, if the whole UX has its capabilities as the foundation, it can change the way the device is used in a way that surely wouldn’t be possible without it 😉

Another good news, is that while some pieces of Plasma Active are specific of a device UX, some other parts, like the enhancements to the activity manager are shared with the desktop, so should be easy to expect some of those features, like an UI for connection between resources and activities soon in the desktop as well.

Those last months have been a lot of hard work in the march towards Plasma Active 1.0, or PA1 in short

Now I can’t already say an exact day and time of the release, but we are sure that’s near, and i mean really near 😉

Every one of you can help making the first release as good as possible, how?

The current pre-release images are downloadable from the usual place, test the hell out of it, it’s fun 🙂

If you find something that is still a bit problematic, you can go to bugs.kde.org, and in the report bug form, there is the “Active” product among the others.

So test it, play with it, have fun and help us to make PA1 as good as possible 🙂

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:

OGG version

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).