Another screencast of yours truly: this shows the Plasma netbook shell running on a bog standard Asus EeePc 1005Ha.
It can be seen the new neat animations of the search and launch interface when results are loaded. What’s neat is that it seems to run quite well on this pretty basic hardware and animations are just as smooth as they should be 🙂
For KDE 4.4, we’re giving a bit of touchscreen friendliness around Plasma, a thing common on touchscreen based uis is the so called flick lists and scroll views. They can be web browsers, simle item views, image explorers and so on.
You just touch (or drag with the mouse, it’s not limited to touchscreens of course) a random point of the view, drag it a bit, release and the contents will be launched with a neat animaton effect, with a resembrance of something real.
In Plasma, if you use the ScrollView widget you’ll get that for free, and if the item view contains some sub widget that wants to listend to mouse clicks as well, is sufficient to call the function ScrollView::registerAsDragHandle(QGraphicsWidget *), with some eventfilter magic, the element registered will still react to mouse click, but will pass them to the view as well. An example of this is the icon view of the Plasma netbook shell: if you click on an application icon it will launch the application, but if you press the mouse over one, move it and release, the application pointed from that icon won’t be launched, instead all the icon view will scroll and will still scroll for a while if the mouse moved over a certain speed.
There is a small video that show this behaviour over several plasmoids: the web browser, the microblog, the OpenDesktop knowledge base client and the Search and Launch interface of the netbook shell.
The WebView widget will behave like that as well, and if you implement a custom one and you want that behaviour -for free-, you just have to call Plasma::Animator::self()->registerScrollingManager(yourwidget), and provided you gave the proper Q_PROPERTY to your widget, all the magic will be done behind the scenes. The properties you’ll need are:
I’ve already talked about the search and launch activity for the netbook shell, so this video rather than explaining again what this is it just gives a brief description of what is changed on it and where the work is heading:
Some work has been done on keyboard navigation, on always giving the expected thing the keyboard focus.
A pretty iconview class has been written to be used in both the results and on the favourite icons on top, making it possible to scroll by “flicking” with the mouse or with the finger in both places, with many cute animations.
And of course tons and tons of fixes.
*Arthur makes remote widgets work on the new Nokia N900: this has really awesome implications. Rob’s work on remote widgets is really cool by itself, and if you add the possibility of exporting widgets on a small device like that it opens the doors to really cool applications, think about a really rich remote controller for your mediacenter, a way for a conference speaker to publish his slides or something related to the attendees regardless the device they’re using, a way for a teacher to control what is available in a computer lab room desktops and stuff we still did not tought about.
*KDE depends on Qt 4.6. This opens the door for us to the use of all the cool new features of this release, a thing we were drooling about since quite some time is the new animation framework. A summer of code project was done to make a really easy to use API to access it from Plasma, to have a library of stock effects that will be coherent across all the widgets. It has been merged into trunk now and when it will be put really in use expect to see fireworks 😀
*Work on the netbook interface continues, we got a pretty nice workflow model for using the newspaper activity, plus the Search and launch activity changed quite a lot since the last screencast. I should reeeally do a couple of new ones, so stay tuned 😀
Since two days there is a new module in systemsettings: workspace under the Desktop category.
Here is possible to switch between the Plasma desktop shell and the netbook shell. the switch will be done on the fly (no need to restart KDE) and it will be remembered the next KDE start.
Plasma desktop will close, Plasma netbook will start and some different settings on KWin will be applied: windows will start as maximized and there will be no border for maximized windows.
The other section is Dashboard: is now possible to configure from here if you want the dashboard with the same content of your desktop or if you want it to show an independent set of widgets.
In the same way, in the Multiple desktops section, is now possible to decide if you want a different plasma activity for each desktop, so the quite hidden config dialog reachable from the zoom interface for those two options has been removed.
Another update on the Plasma netbook project: in this little video i’ll show the last improvements of the so called newspaper activity, little things that however have all their own place in the big picture:
In this video it’s also possible to see more changes, both in the panel and in the Search and Lauch activity, but this is for the next time! (i love teasing people 🙂
As usual, the screencasting appliation has a pretty poor refresh rate and pretty bad refresh problems, to this does not actually reflect 100% the real thing:)
I love when an idea starts to taking form and suddenly starts to make sense in an unexpected way… some days ago Aaron blogged about dropping remote contents inside Plasma: now is possible to drop in several types of content, even from the network and the proper plasmoid capable of doing a little preview of that content will pop up, like the picture frame for an image or the web browser for an html page.
The idea of Plasma as a canvas for some kind of smart bookmarks with live preview of your content and work is taking shape, now what was the logical step was to ask.. what about the other way around?
We now have a quite simple way in the plasma api to associate an application, or an url (with the proper application detected from the mime type) to a Plasma widget. A new button will appear in the applet handle (and a new entry in the context menu) and that application will be launched. The idea is to have a full view of what you have in the widget, as a tiny preview.
Here we go with the long promised screencast about the progress of the Plasma Netbook shell after Tokamak. This time I’ve tried to record an audio track as well: the process is still not very well streamlined so the quality is still so so (composite+screencast still seems a big nono these days) and yeah, bear with my english, it’s what it is, like a certain Nintendo character :p
Aaanyways the stuff I talk about in this video is:
Where the last two are true for the Plasma desktop in general, thanks to the work of Davide and Ana respectively at Tokamak 3.
A while since last blog, so it seems nice to give some updates on the progress on the Plasma netbook shell, since in the past weeks i did some visual changes.
Now the widgets in the newspaper activity shows their background, to achieve more opacity (and readability), and the scroll area have a neat shadow effect to make the clipped edges to look better. The widget in the newspaper containment now should also keep their aspect ratio in a better way.
Also the search and launch interface has some fixes in its layout, and when no query is entered in the search field it spots some icons that do default queries, like all programs of a given category, all contacts and all bookmarks.
To maximize the space given to applications in those tiny screen resolutions now the panel is auto-hide, with the same sliding animation present in the main plasma desktop autohide panels (from KDE 4.4 done by my first Kwin effect, yay :D)
Here comes the usual video (the flickering of the panel is just a problem of the screencast), in the usual YouTube or OGG-o-vision, enjoy 😀
At GCDS we did several shiny things, and talked about even more shiny still to come stuff, like the better integration with kwin and new crazy ideas on the ZUI.
A thing that received a good amount of work is the Plasma on netbook project, in the form of several little components. What is really good about plasma is exactly that is done by many little components, quite easy to code, mantain and reuse.
So what we have now is in playground and can be tried right now on http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/base/plasma/netbook. Here is a video of the current progress of the project, as appeared on the dot.
It’s also a little experiment on the html5 video tag, it should use an ogg file on things like new webkit based stuff (in qtwebkit it works, yay!) or firefox 3.5 and fall back to youtube otherwise, anyways the ogg file is there.
So, the “current window control” is a thing that shows the title and the icon of the current open window, plus a close button, this because there won’t be a titlebar for windows, just fullscreen stuff, and clicking on it it triggers the present windows effect, because there won’t be a taskbar either.
The newspaper activity now looks like tthis, and compared to the state of te previous post is now possible to scroll, adding applets (yes, it needs a brand new add widgets dialog, but that’s coming from a gsoc, yay!) and rearrange them by drag and drop.
The thinghie that is called SAL, meand Search and Launch, and will basically an interface for krunner: in the desktop the alt+f2 dialog is something that is not very prominent so is not really used by the mythical creature called “joe user”, but when you show the thing to them, they love it
So in the netbook, a thing like a menu is not really up to the job (in fact most of previous projects starting from the original eeepc shell to ubuntu netbook remix to moblin all have some different idea about how a small screen proof menu should look like). We have instead opted for a full screen prominent krunner interface, driven by the search box that pops up by clicking on the top right icon on the panel. Compared to the “normal” krunner there is a group of bookmarks in the top area and there will probably be some way to access saved searches (since the first time one uses it it won’t be so obvious what to search for)
Aaand, for really putting the “net” in the netbook, there will be web based runners too, like the wikipedia runner that is already in playground (sebas and rich, you’re great :p), the idea is giving access to network resources like that via runners, plasma widgets and libraries, even without always the need a browser, that is a great thing but not always the best ui possible.
Stay tuned for the next updates 😀