Work on Plasma Mobile continues.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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…<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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<\/em> pixel resolution)<\/p>\n 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<\/a> during Akademy, if it runs on a N900 phone, that can do actual phone calls.<\/p>\n