Since MeeGo uses Connman instead of Networkmanager to handle network connections, that means there is not (yet 😉 an user interface to control in right from the KDE workspaces.
If you happen to have one of the Desktop summit Exopc with the Contour user interface that there has been installed on several devices, here are some easy steps to get the MeeGo tablet Connman ui installed and be able to connect to a wireless network.
Ingredients
A device running the Contour MeeGo ui
An USB keyboard
Either an USB ethernet adaptor (preferred) or a thumbdrive
recipe
Open a konsole
vim /etc/zypp/repos.d/ and replace the urls there with http://download.meego.com/MeeGo/snapshots/stable/1.2.0.90/latest/repos/oss/ia32/packages/ (unfortunately repos url changed since the image was built, with newer releases should be smoother)
If you have the ethernet usb adaptor: zypper install meego-ux-settings
If you don’t have it, download from the url above the following files on a thumbdrive:
From the device, as root, rpm -Uvh /media/whatever/*.rpm
After having installed everything on the device, start the settings application with meego-qml-launcher –app meego-ux-settings. After it connects to your access point, it will automatically reconnect on next startup, so no need to launch the settings app again until you want to change access point.
Don’t forget the two getting started IRC session that will be held this week, where we can help on this and other issues
A plasmoid that can manage connections using Connman is planned shortly 😉
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:
Shipping parts of bigger QML user interfaces as Packages, avoiding making most of it “public api” as the imports do
distributing applications plugins or extra sets such as graphics and sound via get hot new stuff or keep it updated via synchrotron
use the plasma package file loading mechanism to have qml files loaded only in a specific hardware profile, to be able to do a multi device package.
Ship the entire user interface of a mobile application in a single, well structured package
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:
The browser uses nepomuk for its bookmarks, so they are available system wide and they can be connected to an activity
The bookmarks are added with the system-wide SLC menu (more on that next post 😉
all the addresses visited with the browser will end up in the statistics used to generate the Contour recommendations
The image viewer completely ignores the concept of file system, it just uses nepomuk
Same considerations for bookmarks, SLC and recommendations hold for the image viewer too
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
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 😉
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).
