Another small post about new developments in Plasma Active 😉
An important use case for tablet is of course Ebook reading (being them pdf, epub or whatever).
KDE offers a very complete document reading application, that supports a wide variety of formats: Okular. It is of course an application optimized for desktop usage and does a very good job at that, but what is less known is that Okular has a very good separation between the logic of document parsing and rendering, managing bookmarks, annotation etc and the ui itself.
It has been revealed very easy to do a set of QML bindings that let opening all the supported documents by the desktop version of Okular and render them on a component directly usable by QML, alongside a very simple touch friendly application.
This application represents the document as a stack of sheets, in which is possible to flick them around, pich zoom and switching pages with a swipe gesture. A side panel that can be dragged in (common UI pattern in Plasma Active) contains an overview of all the pages as a thumbnail grid.
It’s just the beginning as both the app and the reusable QML components still don’t have support or UI for more complex things like custom bookmarks and annotations, that will eventually come in future versions.
Until now Plasma active had an on screen keyboard that served us well, but due to its implementation had some limits that couldn’t be easily overcome.
However there is a Qt based virtual keyboard project that is very promising: Maliit
It’s the one that was used in the Nokia N9, and already made a good progress since the version used there.
To have a good user experience on Plasma Active it should be well integrated, both as in look and behavior with the rest of the environment. Luckily Maliit is transitioning itself as well to the use of QML to write the user interface, making very easy to switch to a platform specific UI while all the logic stays untouched (I must say I’m quite impressed by this input method framework).
This is the result of just some hours of work towards a keyboard interface that uses Plasma UI components, and hopefully it will be in the next Plasma Active release.
This year with basysKom working on Plasma Active has been very productive, I got to work with really amazing people and I really think we produced something really good.
As I said it has been a very positive experience and I’m looking forward towards future contributions by basysKom and all the other people involved to the Plasma Active project. But things change, and riding, embracing (and provoking) changes is a sign of good health they say :p
Just a little heads up, I’ve now joined Coherent Theory, that means that yes, I’ll continue to work on Plasma Active on the time being, and on the immediate, I’ll give my little contribute to make the Vivaldi release as good as possible 😉
Sadly I didn’t have much time to blog lately, but luckily today i found some time to do a screencast like the good ol’ times.
What’s shown here is an application that will be pretty central in Plasma Active 3: it’s a file browser (or a Resource browser, it can actualy be about much more than files). Basically this will be the central point to manipulate stuff in Plasma Active.
You can browse all the resources by type, by date, with a timeline representation which can have a zoomed level of detail, so browse by year, by month, by day.
You can select files with a two fingers gesture and then via drag and drop you can move them between the internal storage and a removable device such as a microsd, delete them, or tag them (think about the Google+ circles ui)
The ui is all built using the Plasma QML components, keeping a coherent look&feel with everything else, the general feeling of the ui is aiming to be quite natural, with animated, and real-material feeling surfaces, with a plausible phisical disposition, like the main area that can partly slide in/out to reveal the contents hidden under it, namely the sidebar of controls such as tags and timeline.
But yet is not trying too hard to mock some real object: mobile uis that have things like a wood texture background really go too far and besides being completely incoherent one to another,
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.
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.
Javascript API describes the global plasmoid object that gives access to plasma specific features
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 🙂
The rewamp of the KDE Plasma Desktop is continuing: in the 4.8 release it got a completely new QML based device notifier (already quite improved for 4.9), now a new redesign has landed in master, scheduled for the 4.9 release of KDE Plasma Desktop.
The Plasma widget explorer and activity manager have been rewritten from scratch in QML, giving it s much smoother look and feel, new animations for free and what I love most, a way simpler code base.
By replacing the activity manager and widget explorer with the new implementation, over 4000 lines of C++ were removed (traded with around 1000 of much more readable and maintainable QML): this makes it easier to maintain, easier to spot possible problems, easier to modify and experiment new ideas.
With the rewrite of the various components of Plasma Desktop in QML I expect to slash away most of its C++ code base, making the entry level for contributors significantly lower (and being able to finally close long standing bugs 😉
How does it look now?
And the Activity manager: designed to look as coherent as possible with the widgets explorer:
Here showing the inline ui to configure and delete an activity
The overall design is almost the same, but the layout has been redesigned to overcome a problem of the old implementation: it looked quite crowded and dirty, because elements were too cramped together, not very well aligned and sizes were quite eterogeneous. Now we paid a lot of attention about the sizes and positioning of the elements, as shown below, everything is positioned along a quite precise grid, that makes the view look less crowded that it actually is.
I a good trend can be established here, for each release of the KDE Plasma Desktop having some element not only rewritten, but its UI becoming significantly more elegant with few but important improvements in the look or in the behaviour.
One of the priorities in Plasma (desktop and active) is to have a compelling developer story, to make easy, fun and desiderable for people to write plasmoids and actve apps.
The new QML Plasma Components are a big step in this direction, they give a common QML api across devices for a very easy development.
An important part of this is documentation: Api documentation is progressing quite well, but let’s give a little push forward 😉
On the model of the success of the Plasma bug days, let’s have a day on IRC were all interested people can work on them to improve the documentation, have a little getting started tutorial, write wiki pages.
If you are interested on it, please let us know by filling this doodle page.
Today, Plasma Active Two has been released. It has been a pretty hectic 3 months, a very short period that produced anyways a couple of significant architectural enhancements.
Enhancements that are for both users, that will find more nice features and developers, that will find more nice tools for writing new applications and plugins. A way more complete feature tour can be found here. Here are just a couple of things that are quite importnant to me.
Recommendations: organizing items in activities is even easier: you worked for a while on a file or on a website? a simple button to add it to the activity will be present in the left side panel.
New Nepomuk QML bindings: write an application that does complex queries in the semantic database in jjust few lines of QML and JavaScript.
QtComponents: a new widget set to be used in QML applications, that makes very easy porting an application from Harmattan or Symbian.
Bugfixes: we want to make the user experience as smooth as possible 😉
Big props and thanks to everyone that helped out with this release, a group that is growing more and more, from individuals to companies.
One of the biggest new features in Plasma that will be released together KDE Plasma Desktop 4.8 is the new shiny set of QML components, that over the next releases will gradually replace the old simple widgets like pushbuttons lineedits etc.
This is one important step towards a cleaner, easier to use and easier to write user interface, an important step towards Plasma2, where the UI will be completely done in QML, using a fast OpenGL driven scene graph, meaning prettier effects and most important always fast and smooth graphics using more what a modern gpu can actually do.
Here is a video of an example plasmoid (you can find it in the kdeexamples repository, is a good way to learn the api) that shows just a collection of what the available components are.
This is one of the things that are starting to percolate from the work that is being done in Plasma Active and is starting to benefit the desktop as well.
Of course common UI components can’t be really common between the desktop and a mobile device, or between different mobile devices such as tablets and phones, so what about that?
We have a complete series of components targeted to be useful to build widgets for the desktop (as shown in the video above), designed to be as indistinguishable as possible from the old C++ based widgets, so it will mix perfectly in the rest of the desktop. The Device notifier widget is completely rewritten in QML using some of the components for 4.8 and even if it uses 100% new code (modulo the dataengines) it looks and feels exactly the same, there is just a “something” about its smoothness that comes out as a pleasant unexpected thing while it’s used, even if it’s difficult to exactly point the finger at.
So how does the very same widgets gallery plasmoid look when loaded in a Plasma Active two tablet?
The touch specific set of components is used and the plasmoid itself besides using those touch components, adapts itself to the fact of being loaded as a fullscreen application on a tablet and changes its layout accordingly.
Some of those components are pretty universal, especially those without any graphics or input such as Page and PageStack, that manage the life cycle and transitions effect of dynamic pieces of the user interface.
Some components are a bit more specific, but not dramatically different: a button or a text field will look an behave in a very similar way, but for instance we don’t want mouseover effects on a touch screen, and maybe we want the touch area a bit bigger than the actually visible button area for a better grip, but here we still smell at least a partial code sharing.
There are then the ones that we want a flat out different implementation: for instance we want a desktop-themed, independent window for context menus (that is, a QMenu) on the desktop, while we want a more plasma-looking, finger friendly thing on a touchscreen, but still the very same exact api.
We have a series targeted to the current Plasma Active tablet profile uses the 90% of the same code as the desktop version, but everything that needs to be different is different, for instance there we have no mouse over highlight, bigger sizes and hit areas, scrollbars are read only scroll indicators visible only when actually scrolling.
