Tag Archives: mobile

Share, Like and Connect

Software

An important part of the Plasma Active Contour user interface is the connection between the objects that i can view with my tablet, like images, webpages, and documents with the current activity, to help to organize your work and fun.

I already wrote here about the activity screen: the main Contour workspace will show everything that is related to the activity and is the natural evolution of the Plasma Desktop activities (that will evolve in this direction as well as the integration with applications becomes deeper;)

The screencast below shows the usage in practiche of the concept I’m going to explain in the next paragraphs: Share Like Connect (SLC).

It also shows towards the end the progress of the Active image viewer application, a touch friendly image viewer that deeply integrates with the Contour UI in terms of Look&feel and technology, since uses Nepomuk as metadata storage backend and supports SLC

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So we have an interesting UI problem: easily buildthis relationship between objects and activities with just one click (or so;) without having to navigate trough an over complicated user interface.

So, we have a simply search interface right into the workspace, it works well for many use cases and is really simple, but what if I’m browsing a website and want to add exactly that website in my activity? (or a photo I’m viewing, or a document I’m working on Calligra…)

Copy the url of the website, go to the workspace and paste it somewhere? a bit overkill, isn’t it?

Have some UI in the web browser that lets me add the current site to the activity? Definitely better, but we would end up with a different implementation, and a slightly different UI for each application.. can we avoid that?

We also noticed how similar this problem was to another one: is very common that while I’m viewing something i want to share it with someone in some way: I could want to upload on flickr a photo that I’ve just taken, or I may want to send via email to someone a PDF that I’m reading right now.

On the desktop the current workflow is to leave your current application, go to the web broser or email client, search the file again and upload/send it.

On mobile platforms things looks a bit more convenient: many applications have built in the possibility to share the currently open file to some services, but each application has its own implementation, often having a slightly different ui to do the same thing, or support to different web services, maybe because the developers of the application wanted to push their own services (a random example starting with G comes to mind 😉

So, get back to the problem of connecting the current open “thing” to the current activity (avoiding “file” by purpose, since could be something that is not a file at all, like an URL) is similar to wanting to share this same thing with someone, or rate it, or add a tag, tweet it, like on Facebook…

Since we already log what is the currently open object (for how long, how often etc..) to be able to log history and construct recommendations, the external workspace knows this information.

We can provide actions in a global menu in the top panel to perform those tasks, divided under 3 menus: Share (upload on web services, send by email), Like, (rating, bookmarks, “like” on web services), Connect (connect to the current activity, to an event in the calendar, etc).

Each action is implemented by a plugin, and plugins can be written in both C++ and Javascript, making it possible to download them on the fly from the Web

A first version of this global menu will be available with the first release of Plasma Active, and will eventually make its way to Plasma Desktop as well.

Activate your DS toy

Software

At Desktop summit a very nice thing happened: Intel handed out tablet devices to everyone, a pretty sweet (and fast!) Exopc. So, a very big thank you to Intel 🙂

Now happens that many people have a device that is well suited for running the Plasma Active project. that, together prices of those kind of devices coming down, makes very easy to test it.

next week, Tuesday August 16 at 14 UTC and Friday 19 at 12 UTC, join us in the #active channel on irc, for a little install fest session.

Instant apps

Software

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

Here we go with brief showcase videos:

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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.

Contouring resources

Software

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.

OGG version.

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

Desktop summit

Activity config UI for Contour and Active

Software

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)

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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 😉

Welcome Contour

BlaBla

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:

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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

BlaBla

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 🙂

Meego summit and Mobile sprint

BlaBla

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:

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KDE games: Palapeli

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