After an update by Sebastian K
Resources and Activities
Tag Archives: kde4
Resources and Activities
After an update by Sebastian K
Welcome Contour
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).
Reactivate
During last week we spitted out some strange hints about something cool we are preparing. It was been obvious that it had something to do with Plasma and something to do with mobile technologies.
So, here we go with Plasma Active
Active
the active project starts from a simple vision: Create a desirable user experience encompassing a spectrum of devices.
What does it mean? The KDE tecnologies have quite a lot of potential, i think absolutely everywhere, but right nowwe are still mostly targeted on the desktop.
I think that with what we got as platform, is fairly easy, once the last building blocks are there to build both workspaces and applications that can adapt to the whole spectrum of devices computing is today.
An importnant thig comes already in the name: it’s Plasma Active and not Plasma Mobile: why?
What we are doing right now is exactly a mobile project: tablets to be precise, but stopping there would be a mistake.
The Active project is about taking a step further and build applications that have their user interface and implementation completely detached, is about forcing ourselves to not think about a small use case but always about the bigger picture.
Our goal is to be sure that if an application is “certified to be active” can run as well in a tablet, as in an handheld device, as in a set top box, as in a type of device we have completely no idea about, once an user interface module specific for its screen size and input method has been added.
Sounds crazy
But we have the technology, We have QtQuick and Plasma, that combined can provide a single package, that has diffent user interfaces for each supported platform, and the best available interface is chosen from the device. Hopefully the “just right” UI elements will be available, otherwise the best one from a list of preference will be chosen.
Current code
Most of the code for Active is developen in the Plasma mobile repository, with of course all the enhancements needed in the KDE libraries ending up immediately in the usual KDE repos, being immadiately available for the desktop as well.
We don’t only plan to work on the development of the software tough. It’s possible to test the current code from day one, pre packaged, updated continuously.
A bit of clarifications
After Sebas’ blog about it, there was a question on how the various things, Plasma-mobile, Plasma-tablet and the various mobile efforts in KDE relates to each other:
- It’s not a different project compared to plasma-mobile and plasma-tablet
- Plasma mobile and Plasma tablet are actually the same workspace, just a different UI loaded on top of it: that’s the direction we want in both the workspaces and the applications
- It’s an effort to define a good user experience on the mobile, from the distribution all way up to the apps, of which the workspaces are a part of
- Any application, any project is more than welcome to join, bigger the ecosystem is the better it is
- It is now targeted to tablets, this doesn’t exclude phones, set top boxes and washing machines however, that’s the future ;).
Right now it’s available for OpenSuse, later.. who knows 😉
Let’s create the best possible tablet user experience first, then the world 🙂
Build a device scalable user interface
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:
- Shipping the user interface, graphic assets and JavaScript code in a simple package with a well defined and familiar filesystem structure: one single package that can adapt to any devices you want
- For a given device, you must be able to customize and rewrite any part of the interface you want
- But you should have to rewrite only the parts you need, nothing more, recycling all the rest
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:
Towards a declarative Plasma: Containments and tablets
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 😉
Little big cleaning details
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 😀
Separed at birth
Here are two screenshots of Microblog plasmoids. There are two nice novelties that can be noted here (due respectively to KDE Plasma Workpace 4.6 and 4.7) are the support of “reply to message id” in the twitter API, so in Identica conversations will appear correctly threaded (sadly there is still no way to retrieve that threading information from the API) and the support for marking messages as favorites, that will appear in 4.7
On the right is the usual good old stock Microblog plasmoid, on the left it’s the plasmoid rewritten in QML+JavaScript. It is on early development but is probably going to replace the fomer (there are still some layout differences and details, all of this is going to get polished).
What’s nice is that in two days of development that plasmoid reached about 90% of the features the C++ counterpart gained in well, ages 😉 so I’m quite confident the development speed in Plasma will get a dramatic boost.
All of that code in in KDE svn playground repository, I will give more info when all will move to git together with the rest of KDE software.
Meego summit and Mobile sprint
It’s always hard to get a real firm impression on something at the first shot of an unfamiliar new thing, but i can say that it has been a really good conference, at least the impression was of a warm and friendly community even if the organization was on an huge scale (having a *stadium* all for us was kinda a weird feeling, as the meego commercials at the sides of the playing field during the football game, geekiness in the most ungeek place :p) and the netbooks/tablets are quite sweet too 🙂
As the KDE side, I am seeing quite a lot possibilities of collaboration. So far most of the problems seems to revolve around one thing. Awareness. I’ve seen many times real interest after a quick chat explaining what KDE actually is.
Unfortunately KDE is seen as that big monolithic project completely desktop specific…
As soon we started to talk about the kde-mobile modularization effort of kdelibs, the multiple shells of Plasma (Plasma as a building block set to make greatly customized workspaces for any kind of device and/or simple fullscreen applications that can dynamically load a different ui for each profile)
So, in the end was quite educational for everybody. It did let us discover more about what MeeGo, how it works, and what their parts are, and many of the MeeGo community find out about what KDE is. Two communitites encountering without colliding. Great!
Today I’m in Berlin at the KDAB office. They were so kind to host an happy bunch of KDE people to discuss and develop with a mobile target in mind.
Given that almost everybody here has that tablet, expect nice demos and videos of some surprising use of that tablet later this week, alongside (finally!) real packages to make easy for everyone to try KDE on MeeGo.
Wanna some teasing?
Plasma tablet UI prototype:
KDE games: Palapeli
Good old habits: notifications again
Activities
We didn’t put or effort only in the mobile environment or the new declarative “way of doing plasmoids”, but the general polish of the traditional desktop shell, the “most immediate need” for users is quite high on our priority list too.
Chani recently blogged about the last progress of the activities management: in the Plasma Desktop workspace 4.6 finally the advantages are starting to be exposed to the user. In brief: can virtual desktops stop and start applications on demand when they switch? can an application be on 2 out of 5 vd? can a vd be stopped and when recreated be restored exactly as it was? (wallpaper, desktop widgets, running applications etc) can the user remove a non empty, non last virtual desktop? Can an application behave in a way that is specific for a certain desktop, like showing only work related contacts?
Answer to all of those question is a discomforting, deep, structural no. If we ask those questions for the activities, the answer become yes, and the difference of purpose of those two things becomes evident. virtual desktop -> spatial arrangement of windows. Activities -> what I’m doing. There really is little overlap between the two things. Spatial arrangement is often used as activity separation, but is condemned to remain an half backed solution.
Notifications
Yes, notifications again! There won’t be any very big turning upside down of the notification an job area for 4.6 The form it’s “stabilizing”, with minor tweaks that can enhance quite a lot the look and usability of it, let’s see in brief what 4.6 will bring to the notifications and jobs area:
- Slightly revised look: better spacing, less visual noise, more pixel perfection
- More compact layout of the jobs widgets
- A speed plotter for job in the expanded view to be able to see what’s going on in the transfer of a single file
- Global jobs progress bar is hidden when only one job is running
- Notifications can be dragged in the desktop again
- Only one scrollbar, and only when is necessary: everything scrolls and it’s preferred to keep visible active jobs rather than the notification history
- Notifications history tabbar is hidden when only one type is present
- Big icons in notifications to help to identificate what it’s talking about at a glance
- Action buttons moved beside the test to have a smaller notification widget
- It is possible to drag anywhere the notifications popup, so regardless of where the notifications Plasma widget is, they will appear in the place it works better with your workflow.
Since a picture is worth 3000 bullet points here are some screenshots 🙂
