{"id":4678,"date":"2011-04-11T12:29:33","date_gmt":"2011-04-11T12:29:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.notmart.org\/index.php\/BlaBla\/Welcome_Contour"},"modified":"2011-04-11T12:29:33","modified_gmt":"2011-04-11T12:29:33","slug":"welcome_contour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/2011\/04\/welcome_contour\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome Contour"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is a follow up of <a href=\"http:\/\/transloid.blogspot.com\/2011\/04\/contour-joins-plasma-active-track-get.html\">another good news<\/a> that recently appeared on PlanetKDE.<\/p>\n<p>Friday a new project within KDE was announced: <a href=\"http:\/\/community.kde.org\/Plasma\/Active\/\">Plasma Active<\/a>. We explained that wasn&#8217;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 <strong>creating a desirable user experience encompassing a spectrum of devices<\/strong> (and remember the date 09.10.11, just saying)<\/p>\n<p>Today we are happy to announce another project that will be a pretty important piece of the puzzle:  <a href=\"http:\/\/community.kde.org\/Plasma\/Active\/Contour\">Contour<\/a><\/p>\n<h4>The problem<\/h4>\n<p>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&#8217;t like.<\/p>\n<p>What is the common factor of today&#8217;s tablet and handheld operating systems?<\/p>\n<p>The center of how they work, are applications, so called <em>apps<\/em> (why trying to give a new word to a concept at least 40 years old still escapes me btw).<\/p>\n<p>All the tasks that you can accomplish with the device are delegated to a single application (that maybe isn&#8217;t enough to do exactly what you want). That&#8217;s really a model not much different compared to the desktop one.<\/p>\n<p>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<\/p>\n<p>On the desktop side, in KDE we are doing pretty good integration wise, can we do as good in the mobile front?<\/p>\n<p>And with integration I don&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<h4>Contour<\/h4>\n<p>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:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" width=\"640\" height=\"390\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/kXXdk8RoP6U\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blip.tv\/file\/get\/Notmart-ContourConceptPrototype539.ogv\">OGG version<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Right now I just want to present this user interaction prototype, then we&#8217;ll talk more about the actual details behind it, both UI-wise and what is the technology making it possible.<\/p>\n<p>What I&#8217;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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What I&#8217;m doing right now with my device? (yes, <strong>activities<\/strong> again!)<\/li>\n<li>What kind of resources are now open? (can be files, contacts, urls, whatever)<\/li>\n<li>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)<\/li>\n<li>Somewhat related example on the above point: I don&#8217;t want 3 apps and the workspace having 4 different concepts and storage for &#8220;Bookmarks&#8221; for instance.<\/li>\n<li>What kind of resources <em>could be<\/em> relevant to this activity? or what actions could be important? (could be publish this photo, answer this email, feed the fish, whatever \ud83d\ude42<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now, In the last years of development in KDE, we have <em>almost<\/em> 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&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s just somewhat harder to do on a desktop since here there are quite a lot of legacy constraints and a long &#8220;genetic memory&#8221; of the last 30 years that makes really hard for new paradigms to emerge, however I&#8217;m sure we&#8217;ll gradually get into it there as well \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;ll be able to have this resource centric, activity based system in a pretty good shape in a really short time.<\/p>\n<h4>Plasma Active<\/h4>\n<p>So how does it relate to Plasma Active and the current tablet user interface?<\/p>\n<p>Contour is an experimental user interface based on Plasma, that does an heavy usage of Nepomuk and won&#8217;t be intended for everyday usage at first, but&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;ready&#8221;, the main Plasma Tablet user interface will immediately adopt it (and eventual other Active workspaces that will surface later).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9,31,2,10,11,7],"class_list":["post-4678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blabla","tag-active","tag-contour","tag-kde","tag-kde4","tag-mobile","tag-plasma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4678\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}