Tag Archives: documentation

Plasma active device profiles documentation

Software

The thing we always stressed out in Plasma Active is how the system is designed to fit a whole device spectrum, even if the first two releases are explicitly about tablet devices (and in the near future this is not likely to change 😉

But how? it’s pretty obvious that one user interface doesn’t fit all for sure. Some devices, like mobile phones could share let’s say the 60% of the QML UI written for the tablet, some other, let’s say set top boxes could need something radically different.

The Plasma Active shell is actually something that doesn’t provide any user interface at all, but instead provides some basic features in the logic: manages the user Activities and loads the plugins that will provide the actual user interface, assembled like a LEGO to fit the user experience of a particular form factor.

About user interface plugins: the central parts are Containments and Applets, that are familiar from Plasma Desktop, a new one is a package format used to distribute stand alone QML files sets, and a very important one in the Plasma Active shell is the Home screen.

The Home screen package is a set of qml files that behaves the basic behavior of a Plasma Active shell, such as how Containments are managed, and manages other pieces of user interface such as the activity switcher, the top panel, the application launcher and the recommendation overlay. So by changing this it’s possible to change a lot of the behaviour of the Plasma shell (a particular device could also require a different plugin for the main containment, as they are different between Plasma Desktop and the tablet version with its browser of Nepomuk resources)

To make easier for developers that are interested in new form factors to heavily customize the look and feel of Plasma Active, I’ve put together a wiki page that describes how to proceed writing a new homescreen, and what is the API used in the communication between the shell and the QML part.

Plasma QML documentation

Software

Just a brief heads up. As you know, from now on the recomended way to write plasmoids will be using QML only, and using the new components api for common widgets such as buttons, sliders etc.

What’s cool about this API is that is as compatible as possible with Symbian and Harmattan(N9/N950), so porting to and from those platforms just became a tad easier (That’s especially important in the perspective of Plasma Active).

The documentation of those components just landed on api.kde.org, and can be seen here.

Other useful resources for QML plasmoids:

A big thanks to everybody that helped writing the documentation, to Antonis that helped with the script for the generator and Allen that helped with the setup of the infrastructure to api.kde.org 🙂

Documentation: it has to be done

BlaBla

Plasma has a wonderful theming engine, that enables the creation of a really stunning visual appearance, with a great amount of customizability, just look at what is available right now, to not mention that being vector based makes the widget set pretty flexible and able to be used on really different hardware form factors with different sizes and dpi.

But we’re developers and we like to write code, hack on stuff, we often forget to document things, and this is an area that really can get better.

Yesterday I’ve forced myself to look at the quite incomplete and outdate documentation for the Plasma theme system and I’ve looked file by file, element by element and completed and ordered the whole theme.

Now if you have any doubt on the Plasma theme structure, just go to the relevant techbase page, and you’ll find the complete list of every file and every element in every file, updated to the upcoming 4.5 release. this should ease a lot the construction of themes.

It has been a long and painful work, of which developers may really want to avoid it, but it incredibly pays the effort, because it’s a really important part of the elegance we are trying to reach. A complete, pretty and documented framework is what is elegant to a quite relevant part of our audience: developers that are approaching the platform for the first time.

Now we are restructuring the techbase page for Plasma, moving here the pages that makes more sense here, having the two wikis more in focus and comprehensible.

If you are interested, if you are trying to approach the development in Plasma and have difficulties to grok some of the concepts, if you already work on some plasma aspects such as plasmoids, just stop on #plasma on freenode and you can give an hand in the documenting effort, being tutorials, wiki pages or API docs, you’ll learn quite a lot of the internals in the process and will make easier for others to learn.