A while since last blog, so it seems nice to give some updates on the progress on the Plasma netbook shell, since in the past weeks i did some visual changes.
Now the widgets in the newspaper activity shows their background, to achieve more opacity (and readability), and the scroll area have a neat shadow effect to make the clipped edges to look better. The widget in the newspaper containment now should also keep their aspect ratio in a better way.
Also the search and launch interface has some fixes in its layout, and when no query is entered in the search field it spots some icons that do default queries, like all programs of a given category, all contacts and all bookmarks.
To maximize the space given to applications in those tiny screen resolutions now the panel is auto-hide, with the same sliding animation present in the main plasma desktop autohide panels (from KDE 4.4 done by my first Kwin effect, yay :D)
Here comes the usual video (the flickering of the panel is just a problem of the screencast), in the usual YouTube or OGG-o-vision, enjoy 😀
At GCDS we did several shiny things, and talked about even more shiny still to come stuff, like the better integration with kwin and new crazy ideas on the ZUI.
A thing that received a good amount of work is the Plasma on netbook project, in the form of several little components. What is really good about plasma is exactly that is done by many little components, quite easy to code, mantain and reuse.
It’s also a little experiment on the html5 video tag, it should use an ogg file on things like new webkit based stuff (in qtwebkit it works, yay!) or firefox 3.5 and fall back to youtube otherwise, anyways the ogg file is there.
A plasma shell (the actual executable), if you were using it previously pay attention that now has been renamed from plasma-mid to plasma-netbook, that’s the form factor it’s targetted in the near future anyways 🙂
A panel, simpler than the one in the desktop, that contains several widgets a “current window control”, an activity bar, a systray usual clock and a search widget (more on that later).
the two main activities: newspaper and Sal
So, the “current window control” is a thing that shows the title and the icon of the current open window, plus a close button, this because there won’t be a titlebar for windows, just fullscreen stuff, and clicking on it it triggers the present windows effect, because there won’t be a taskbar either.
The newspaper activity now looks like tthis, and compared to the state of te previous post is now possible to scroll, adding applets (yes, it needs a brand new add widgets dialog, but that’s coming from a gsoc, yay!) and rearrange them by drag and drop.
The thinghie that is called SAL, meand Search and Launch, and will basically an interface for krunner: in the desktop the alt+f2 dialog is something that is not very prominent so is not really used by the mythical creature called “joe user”, but when you show the thing to them, they love it
So in the netbook, a thing like a menu is not really up to the job (in fact most of previous projects starting from the original eeepc shell to ubuntu netbook remix to moblin all have some different idea about how a small screen proof menu should look like). We have instead opted for a full screen prominent krunner interface, driven by the search box that pops up by clicking on the top right icon on the panel. Compared to the “normal” krunner there is a group of bookmarks in the top area and there will probably be some way to access saved searches (since the first time one uses it it won’t be so obvious what to search for)
Aaand, for really putting the “net” in the netbook, there will be web based runners too, like the wikipedia runner that is already in playground (sebas and rich, you’re great :p), the idea is giving access to network resources like that via runners, plasma widgets and libraries, even without always the need a browser, that is a great thing but not always the best ui possible.
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.
