Tag Archives: plasma mobile

Fosdem and Plasma Mobile Sprint

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From January 31st to February 8th I went on a little tour, first at the two days of Fosdem in Brussels, then to Berlin for a KDE sprint about Plasma Mobile.

It was the first time i went to Fodem: it’s an awesome experience, even tough big and messy: which is the awesome of it… and the bad of it at the same time 🙂

Even tough there were 800 talks I didn’t attend that many, some about the Elixir language, some about retrocomputing, some about iot stuff. At Fosdem the best thing to do there.. is meeting a lot of interesting people, rather than attending talks, which are very interesting never the less, which you can find videos here.

I stayed most of the time at the KDE booth. in there we had as usual some hardware to show: besides the usual occasional “normal” laptops running Plasma, we had a PineBook pro running Plasma on Manjaro which runs impressively well for such a low resource machine and was in fact a favorite among the visitors.

Yep, there were a lot of people.

Besides that we had some Pinephones running Plasma Mobile, which they were very popular as well. The Plasma Mobile shell was very stable compared to last year fosdem which made me quite happy.

Looking people using it for the first time, was also a very precious feedback on what are the UI problems new users can encounter.

Feedback that turned out to be very useful the next week, when together other people working on Plasma Mobile and two perople from the UBports project few to Berlin for a Plasma Mobile sprint, graciously hosted by KDAB in their spaces.

There will be many points we will be able to collaborate with UBPorts, starting from background technology such as their telephony services, the content sharing infrastructure, and maybe push notifications. Tough in the end, we want their apps running smoothly on Plasma Mobile and our apps running smoothly on UBports as well, to have as many apps as possible.

Personally, the areas that i worked more at the sprint were the Plasma Mobile homescreen and fixes in Kirigami that were needed for some plasma mobile apps to look better.

On the Plasma Mobile homescreen, now dragging plasmoid thumbnails from the widget explorer to the homescreen works properly (fix in KWin, also drag and drop icons in your desktop wayland session should be fine now)

Plasma Mobile, Clean homescreen look

In order to make the homescreen look a bit more “modern” and less busy, I also removed most of the gray background rectangles that were there and in general simplified the homescreen code a bit, here is the result:

In general, it seems to me that Plasma Mobile is actually really start coming together 🙂

Plasma Mobile Widgets explorer

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Work on Plasma Mobile continues.

Bit after bit all the pieces come together: what’s impressing is how much the Plasma framework we have built into years is paying now.

Plasma Mobile still lacked a widget explorer: the particular formfactor really required a custom one since the one used in the desktop has a pretty different usage pattern and is targeted at a really different form factor (here we are targetting -really- small screen sizes).

I was expecting that writing one could take a quite long amount of time, after all getting there the firt time taken a fair amount of work…

I couldn’t have been more wrong. In less than two days I have now a working widget explorer, that works pretty well on small touch screens, using a mix of QML, Plasma Widgets and C++ models

The main interface is a big flicking icon grid, with a side panel that shows detailed informations on the widget (that can be scrolled with the finger as well).

To add a new widget into the screen, just click at the “+” icon positioned where the widget will be. Interaction wise is way simpler than the Plasma Desktop mechanism, because of both precision of the input device (where with device I mean a fat finger :p) and of screen size (where with size i mean actual phisical size, not pixel resolution)

This little video shows it in action on the usual device. ah, and a curiosity, at some point you see the screen switches to an activity with a big numeric keypad.. that’s not a mockup, as Artur announced during Akademy, if it runs on a N900 phone, that can do actual phone calls.

OGG version

Small mobile update

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I’ve been mainly working on polishing the systemtray and the Netbbok stuff lately. Among the other things a massive rework of the Search and launch nterface, but sadly it’s one of those architectural things that opposed to an huge change in the code there is barely anything to see visually 🙂 well, actually there is a new animation effect that i will maybe screencast later, but changes are mainly under the hood.

But this doesn’t mean i did neglet our new born baby: Plasma Mobile

It also had some not easy to see under the hood change, but this made possible to implement what it was just a gray background stub in the last screencast.

As we seen, we have a main view, with the “activities” (there will be useful widgets here like fast updates on social network services, presence on im network, summaries on new messages such as mails and sms and things like that)

Clicking anywhere not occupied by a widget makes the entire screen flip, showing launchers for all installed applications, categorized by the main activities. At the moment what’s it’s showing are results of KRunner queries.

In this video you can see how the thing is already basically working, both the effects, (quite fast already even if there is still a big optimization work to do) and the functionality of the widgets as well of the main launcher

OGG version