Here we go with the long promised screencast about the progress of the Plasma Netbook shell after Tokamak. This time I’ve tried to record an audio track as well: the process is still not very well streamlined so the quality is still so so (composite+screencast still seems a big nono these days) and yeah, bear with my english, it’s what it is, like a certain Nintendo character :p
Aaanyways the stuff I talk about in this video is:
How to try it if you have a svn trunk build
Keyboard and touch screen navigation
New background dialog
Integration with the new widgets explorer
Where the last two are true for the Plasma desktop in general, thanks to the work of Davide and Ana respectively at Tokamak 3.
With the usual disclaimer that is a very early barely working prototype that will be probably massively different from anything final, it’s nice to show the screenshot of the other day in action.
So now I did some arrangements in the playground netbook stuff to give a thing that mostly works without too much hassle in the initial configuration and that it’s kinda possible to use it as the main shell instead of the desktop.
Here is possible to see the newspaper activity used for weather and to read feeds (will be able to scroll its contents in the future) and the one used to launch applications, in this video that is nothing else than a folderview, but the final launcher interface will be more like a crossover between a menu and something like krunner
In this video is also possible to see some things that strongly suggest the departure from the “desktop” concept, because when those kinds of devices are treated just like small notebooks they are just not up to the job, since te way desktop guis are designed simply don’t work at those screen resolutions (and inches of screen). Of course we can’t rewrite all of KDE applications (neither would be so smart to do so), but i’m pretty confident that KDE and Qt apps in genereal are quite easy to adapt to smaller screens 🙂
Anyways back on track, here can be seen that the thing usually called desktop is not a desktop for two reasons: we don’t have that free layout for icons and widgets that we’re accustomed to see, and it’s not something to be seen as a background: is a window like the others (that by the are always maximized and borderless) that can be chosen and switchd to, so available in the “taskbar” (that here is the kwin present-windows effect, since netbooks harware appears to be a bit more standardized than regular systems, we can more realistically relay on desktop effects being on)
Also clicking anywhere in the panel brings the main plasma interface to front, since is the main interface between the user and the system and it’s here where the user starts the apps, switches between apps and sees the quick updates of the favourite internet places, via the newspaper activity.
