Those last months have been a lot of hard work in the march towards Plasma Active 1.0, or PA1 in short
Now I can’t already say an exact day and time of the release, but we are sure that’s near, and i mean really near 😉
Every one of you can help making the first release as good as possible, how?
The current pre-release images are downloadable from the usual place, test the hell out of it, it’s fun 🙂
If you find something that is still a bit problematic, you can go to bugs.kde.org, and in the report bug form, there is the “Active” product among the others.
So test it, play with it, have fun and help us to make PA1 as good as possible 🙂
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
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.
Since MeeGo uses Connman instead of Networkmanager to handle network connections, that means there is not (yet 😉 an user interface to control in right from the KDE workspaces.
If you happen to have one of the Desktop summit Exopc with the Contour user interface that there has been installed on several devices, here are some easy steps to get the MeeGo tablet Connman ui installed and be able to connect to a wireless network.
Ingredients
A device running the Contour MeeGo ui
An USB keyboard
Either an USB ethernet adaptor (preferred) or a thumbdrive
recipe
Open a konsole
vim /etc/zypp/repos.d/ and replace the urls there with http://download.meego.com/MeeGo/snapshots/stable/1.2.0.90/latest/repos/oss/ia32/packages/ (unfortunately repos url changed since the image was built, with newer releases should be smoother)
If you have the ethernet usb adaptor: zypper install meego-ux-settings
If you don’t have it, download from the url above the following files on a thumbdrive:
From the device, as root, rpm -Uvh /media/whatever/*.rpm
After having installed everything on the device, start the settings application with meego-qml-launcher –app meego-ux-settings. After it connects to your access point, it will automatically reconnect on next startup, so no need to launch the settings app again until you want to change access point.
Don’t forget the two getting started IRC session that will be held this week, where we can help on this and other issues
A plasmoid that can manage connections using Connman is planned shortly 😉
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Just a little reminder: since the release of the next version of KDE Plasma Workspace draws near, as usual, if you are a good photographer, you have the opportunity to get one of your photos in the default set of wallpapers of the upcoming release.
If you want to participate, those are the rules:
you must be the author of the photograph, you must provide your full name and you have to state the license (lgpl v3 is better).
entries must be at least 1920×1200 resolution and a copy of the photo in RAW format (if available) is apprecitated.
you must send your photographs to davide.bettio@kdemail.net before the 13th of june with the word “WALLPAPER” in the subject
Your wallpapers will be evaluted by some of the KDE artists and the best wallpapers will be released as part of KDE Plasma Workspace 4.7.
Just a quickie, after the new Activity configuration dialog, in order to have more continuity of the style, the widget explorer, to add Plasma widgets has been refreshed, in its graphical style as in its behaviour:
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)
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 😉
