At Desktop summit a very nice thing happened: Intel handed out tablet devices to everyone, a pretty sweet (and fast!) Exopc. So, a very big thank you to Intel 🙂
Now happens that many people have a device that is well suited for running the Plasma Active project. that, together prices of those kind of devices coming down, makes very easy to test it.
next week, Tuesday August 16 at 14 UTC and Friday 19 at 12 UTC, join us in the #active channel on irc, for a little install fest session.
Recently the Plasma library just got a new neat feature: the support for packages of files the are pretty generic, not bounded to being a “plasmoid”.
Is something, that even tough seemingly small, has some pretty interesting applications:
How those are used? for the main part of the Plasma active Contour UI home screen, besides from that i decided to give it a go for doing partly C++, partly QML stand alone applications.
The two examples below represent not more than 4-ish hours of work each and are a web browser and an image viewer. What is interesting is that they got almost for free some contour specific features, like:
Here we go with brief showcase videos:
Of course those are just at the beginning and at proof of concept level, but they show the potentiality of this framework to build QML based “active apps” very, very quickly.
Unfortunately I haven’t blogged since a llloong time, my fault 😉
But this doesn’t mean the things in Plasma land aren’t moving, au contraire! Last months I have been busy as hell with the Contour project, and the results are starting to became evident.
A quite big amount of progress has been made on several fronts: the user interface, the infrastructure of the Plasma mobile shell and what is even down in the stack from it, like Nepomuk and the KDE mobile profile
Also on the system integration front things have changed a lot. Admittedly trying out the KDE mobile software on an actual device has always been a bit of a voodoo operation, but now there are two ready to go booting pendrive images, for MeeGo and OpenSuse, together of course always updated package repositories (further information on the Plasma Active wiki).
I now want to show, as often as possible short videos of the User Interface of Contour, a little teaser for each notable feature.
First thing first, the screen the user sees when the tablet is turned on: an usual workspace with a wallpaper… it has icons.. (and eventually widgets)
but, interaction-wide you see that has some improvements for small/medium touch screens: icons are not individual, but categorized in boxes (documents, music, contacts…).
Second, everything is always aligned to a grid, making the composition always “look good” and impossible for those boxes to overlap, but still possible to drag them around to give a personal organization that helps your spatial memory.
And the last important characteristic is behind the scenes: that’s not a view on some folder as the desktops used to be: but it’s all data coming from Nepomuk, meaning that can be any type of what in Nepomuk is a “Resource”, so not only a file but also more abstract data like a contact, an email or a geographical location.
Everything that you see there are resources that have been connected to the activity, so each one will show a different list of resources (this could also make possible in the future for instance to show those activity resources as default in a file open dialog for instance)
How those resources can be connected to activities.. material for the next video 😉
If you are interested to have a more in depth look at the Contour UX and you will be at the Desktop summit in Berlin, you can stop by at this talk :p
Just a quickie, after the new Activity configuration dialog, in order to have more continuity of the style, the widget explorer, to add Plasma widgets has been refreshed, in its graphical style as in its behaviour:
This is a quick update on a feature that was still missing, but now we got it ;).
this short video shows the new ui for the configuration of an activity: right now you can configure the activity name and wallpaper, probably more options to come (even tough it will remain as simple as possible). It is accessed by a button on the activity switcher weel or from the activity itself (if the used Plasma containment provides a config button)
This will probably be shared in the initial creation of an activity as well. In the near weeks it will be possible from the activity wheel to create and delete activities (including options to clone the current activity, or create one based on templates downloadable from the web), so, more to come, stay tuned 😉
After an update by Sebastian K
After an update by Sebastian K
As previewed some time ago, the ongoing effort of porting the current stock Plasma Desktop widgets to QML isn’t not just recreating them and be done with it, but rather pushing QML a bit beyond of what it can usually do and give a platform to build user interfaces that can adapt to different kinds of situations and devices permitting of:
In QML plasmoids, we provide some mechanisms (plasmapackage:/ urls, plasmoid.file() function) that will load resources always from within the Plasma package (the single zip file you downloaded from Get hot new stuff, for instance) and always the proper one. What doe it mean?
Any resource you may need, that can be a qml file, a javascript file, an image, a sound… can be something shared between all possible platform targets, or something that is specific for a certain one. Not only this, you coul need as well for instance a file that is shared between a tablet and handheld profile, but not used in the desktop world.
this little video shows the rss news reader QML plasmoid (the usual guinea pig i use for this kind of experiments) loaded on a desktop, looking like an usual harmless desktop widget and as a standalone window, intended to be used on a tablet form factor device.
And a blurry live action video here:
In the KDE Plasma Workspace 4.6 there was for the first time the possibility to write Plasmoids completely with a mix of the QML declarative language and Javascript, part of QtQUICK, this makes development dramatically faster (and with dramatically I mean that in around 2 days, c++ plasmoids developed since 4.0 can been rewritten from scratch)
Now, for 4.7 we are increasing even more the capabilities of the QML script engine, with the target of being able to write any kind of complex user interface with the QML/JavaScript languages in conjunction with the Plasma API.
The last addition is declarative containments:
In the Plasma workspaces, the activities are represented by spaces for the widgets, that can be very different, just think about how different they are the appearances and layouts of the Plasma Desktop shell, the Netbook and the Mobile ones.
The way in which the Plasma widgets UI components are loaded, shown and managed is quite important for the final user experience of a particular device, and has to be pretty specific and tailored to the particular form factor.
On the desktop shell, everything on the desktop it’s information always with you, wispered in the background, where everything is freely positioned and resized (also due to the large space available)
On the netbook, we have a different use case and a different hardware: a free layout wouldn’t work there because of the screen real estate, and because a desktop would be almost never visible there, so all the information is in a big scrollable page, that can be brought any time in front of all the other windows.
In the mobile/handheld shell, the same concept is brought even further: the widgets can zoom to full screen, having two modes, a non interagible, reduced view, to a zoomed, interactive mode, due to the extreme small size of the screen.
Now what’s missing? lately the tablet form factor is exploding, that means the need for an ui adapt to a 7-8 inches touch screen without keyboard.
On a such form factor, the approach of zooming to full screen followed by the handheld shell wouldn’t be optimal, but we had another idea there.
A first prototype of the idea we developed now was already seen in a prototype based on the netbook shell and newspaper containment in 2009. The tecnique for managing the widget was later chosen as well from the MeeGo tablet UX, even if the approach on the widget themselves is radically different (here there is a fixed set of widget that represents the main kind of media the device can handle, like pixctures, music and video)
This has now been rewritten as a stand alone containment completely in QML (with the code size a fraction of the original)
A video of a preliminar version can be seen here.
The goal there is to show to the user a quick glance of all the data the user usually works with in all the activities (yes, that word again;) he does usually with the device, with the possibilities to expand all those little previews in a proper full screen touch friendly application.
In this video you can see as well other new things that I still didn’t write about… that’s for the next time, stay tuned 😉
Disclaimer: this entry won’t talk about a certain thing happened those days, and I won’t in future entries as well, until there is actually something to talk about.
There is a thing that came to my mind some days ago, when i finally decide to fix a little visual inconsistency that was bugging me since some time.
In the KDE Plasma Workspace 4.7, the clock and keyboard layout indicator will look like this (landed in git earlier this week):
The style of the systemtray is now much more coherent, all thanks to a quite slight change of look in those two little elements, in the specific, text svg-themed themed like the systray icons (that is by the way usable by everybody since it has been placed in the public plasma api)
A thing that will come for 4.7, is a series of many small improvements of many little pain points, may be either a small missing feature, a fix of a little inconsistency, or, in any case something small, easy to contribute that everyone that is eyeingto start to do some patches can find as an easy entry point.
There are already some heroes that have joined and started to review all shipped plasmoids for some points of behavioural consistence. First step, now, thanks to them in 4.7 all plasmoids will have a working “apply” button in their settings dialog.
You can make the diffrence too 😀