Last week, Marco and I have integrated a new window switcher into Plasma Active. We had designed and started to implement this rather central component of the shell during the Tokamak sprint a couple of weeks ago, now it finally made its way into Active, so you can update your system to the latest packages and enjoy it. (In order for it to work correctly, you’ll have to delete your plasma-tablet-appletsrc file, as we do not update these automatically at this stage of development). The new window switcher works very well, and is quite snazzy on top of that. It also contains an application launcher! I’ve recorded a small demo video showing these new features.
Window Strip
The idea is to have a non-modal interface, which means that the window switcher does not block, but allows to interact with other applications that are currently in focus. For this, we use a panel which can be dragged down partly or completely from the top, revealing a strip of windows that is horizontally flickable with the finger. This way, it works for only a few windows, but also scales quite well for those that want to have more apps open at the same time.
The implementation is a bit hacky, but only in the background. It is in fact a combination of QML and KWin’s compositing effects. We are basically catching move events, "polishing" these into a more straight stream of events which we then pass to KWin, asking the window manager to paint thumbnails of the windows at a given position. While we didn’t know if it would work at all when we came up with this design, luckily it turned out to be nice and very usable.
App Launcher
The new panel also has an app launcher, which allows you to launch an app. As the user might potentially have lots of apps installed, there’s a "tag cloud" which lists categories of apps (you tap on one and it shows only apps in the category), and a search field you can use to find apps. (There’s a theming problem which affects readability in the tag cloud, we’ll fix that shortly.) As the number of apps available might not fit into the available screen space, you can flick the apps grid horizontally to reveal more apps.
These features have already been merged into the KDE:Active packages on the Open Build Service, and you’ll be able to try them on your device with the next Balsam Professional Live image.
What do you think about these new pieces in the UI?
During the past weeks, we’ve been kind of silent around Plasma Active. This doesn’t mean we’ve just been sitting on our lazy bums, but that we’ve poured a lot of work into various aspects of the Plasma Active user experience. Let me details these changes to give you some idea of where we are. But first off, …
What is Plasma Active?
Plasma Active is a KDE project building a touch-friendly user experience for the device spectrum. You can compare it to the KDE Software Compilation, Plasma Active provides a workspace and applications. The first focused target devices are tablets, such as the ExoPC, also known as WeTab. Plasma Active builds on top of KDE frameworks such as the Plasma libraries and the Nepomuk Semantic Desktop, offering a touch-friendly interface taylored to use-cases of the specific device. Components of Plasma Active are re-usable across different devices, bringing many well-known apps to new devices. The user interface used on a specific device can differ across devices, making sure it fits the devices characteristics and use-cases.
How is Plasma Active developed?
Plasma Active is fully community-developed and builds on existing KDE frameworks. Re-using technologies such as Plasma, we already have quite some usefl apps to run on Plasma Active, more apps are relatively easy to write or to port to Plasma Active. (I’ll explain more about this in a later blog.) One very nice thing is that Plasma Active by design is “ultimately hackable”, it uses components that many people know already, many aspects of the system can even be directly changed on the device by opening it’s QML files with the description of the user interfaces. Plasma Active’s development happens in KDE’s Git infrastructure, communication can be followed on the active@kde.org mailinglist, our IRC channel (#active on irc.freenode.net) is welcoming and open for everyone. This doesn’t mean that there’s no commercial investment in Plasma Active, or that it’s impossible to participate in Plasma Active as a commercially interested partner, it’s just that the foundation is in the hands of a Free software project — KDE — leveling the playing field for everybody else. Two good examples for commercial partners in Plasma Active are basysKom and open-slx. BasysKom contributes design and development effort into the Contour shell, which forms the basic workspace for Plasma Active. open-slx (my employer :)) invests into development of Plasma Active core components, system integration, packaging, testing and deployment. As such, we continously work on turning Plasma Active from Git Repo into something end-user ready — which is also our mission, we want to bring Plasma Active to the masses. For this, we’re releasing regularly updated Live Images of Balsam Professional running Plasma Active, and we’re working hard on making these images also installable. You can test those images in a virtual machine (you’ll want one that supports composited graphics, such as Virtual Box), or directly on the device. The Balsam Professional Live Image boots out of the box on the ExoPC / WeTab, and we’re working on support for more diverse hardware.
To keep track of our different focus points, we’ve created a map of the different “tracks” we follow with our development.
Where is Plasma Active Today?
System-wise, the current status is that we have a bootable live image (Balsam Professional) with a touch-friendly shell, a bunch of apps that can be used. Boot performance is a bit on the slow side right now (but improving, there are some changes to the boot process planned), runtime performance is pretty good already, as you can see in the videos that we’ve posted already. At open-slx we are working on refining the image in terms of preconfiguration, performance and so on. We’re also quite close to making the image installable, so you can easily install it once (as dualboot on your device, if you wish) and then keep tracking Plasma Active development just by updating your packages regularly.
During the Meego conference in San Francisco, basysKom demoed parts of Plasma Active and the Contour shell. A video has been recorded which gives a good idea of which direction we’re going:
On the software side, we’re working on a bunch of different things
Resource visualization: As we’re using Nepomuk as the underlying data structure, we’ve implemented data-driven widgets that represent “Things” in the Nepomuk store. These can be local files, online resources, but also abstract things like tags, for example. These “Resource delegates” as we call them form basic building blocks of your assets in Plasma Active.
Web-browser and web-integration: As “The Web” is one of the most important use-cases for Plasma Active, we’re spending quite some time now on making this work really well. After shopping around, we decided that our best bet on the web-browser would be a touch-friendly version of Rekonq, using QML. We’ve already made some progress towards that direction, but we’re not there yet.
Share-Like-Connect: Share-Like-Connect will bring ubiquitous (just *had* to use this word once ;)) social networking and sharing to Plasma Active. I’ll not go into details here since this topic is way too awesome, so we’ll dedicate a separate post to it.
From my personal point of view as a user, I must say that Plasma Active is becoming a rock star. It’s already quite usable for surfing the web, reading news or email. It is not stable software yet, more comparable to an Alpha state (there are quite some bugs left to be squished, and it’s not feature complete). Our progress is very noticeable, however, which is promising for our first targeted released end of September.
More info…
If you’d like to know more about Plasma Active, or follow its development, the following resources are interesting:
(What? We’re back to tacky K-Names? Don’t worry, just using the K to reminisce us of our roots. :-)) The Platform 11 sprint in Randa is now in full swing, while relatively little code is being written by the 24-ish people here (and the occasional visitors from one of the other 3.5 sprints happening in the same building, at the same time), we’re very, very busy. It’s basically work until collapse, sleep and start again. Kevin is applying his kanban magic to manage the sprint and get everybody focused and synched. Kanban Magic means that we’re using a wall and a lot of post-it notes with tasks and topics on them, and we move those post its through different stages indicated by swimming lanes on the wall, froom waiting through design, review to done. The first note has just passed the review stage and is now in done state: our first accomplishment. :-)
As we’re working on issues central to how we all (KDE and Qt hackers) develop, I’m sure you’re impatiently waiting for results to pour onto the Internet. While our first focus is on personal interaction and using the facetime and “high personal bandwidth” to solve hard problems, you can get at least an overall impression of the direction of our work, as we’re tracking our results on the wiki.
What is really good and healthy to see is the number of different stakeholders (sometimes represented by the same person wearing multiple hats). This way we can make ‘reasonably sure’ that we take different point of views into account, and find solutions that work for us all. One might expect that this results in endless discussions, but in practise, most of us are on the same page, and where we’re not, we’re taking the time to sync up and see how much common ground we have, and how we can take advantage of that. There are people from up and downstream, from subcommmunities and companies, and people that all have different stakes in the KDE platforms and frameworks.
A big thanks goes to those who made this sprint possible: first of course to all the participants who are focused, motivated and working hard to produce good results. Then of course to Mario and his excellent team of volunteers who make sure we’re fed, warm, safe and taken care of. There is a number of sponsors without which this sprint would not have been possible, those are the Raiffeisen bank, Swisscom and openSUSE who generously chipped in to get us all together for a focused meeting to improve our foundations. Thanks to you all! We are certainly justifying the energy, passion and resources made available to us by working very hard to produce good results!
Tonight I’ll board a sleeper train which will get me to Randa, Switzerland by tomorrow morning. I’m travelling to that small village in the Swiss Alps to participate in the Platform11 sprint.
What is this platform11 sprint about? (Randa’s trainstation only has 2 platforms, one towards Zermatt, one towards Visp. That’s probably not it.) The wiki page about the sprint makes it more clear, however:
To examine the current state and near future of the KDE Platform (kdelibs and kdebase-runtime), particularly as it relates to the growing usage of it in new contexts such as mobile or on Windows and MacOS and its traditional usage as a set of conveniences and consistency creators for KDE application development. The sprint will aim to create an actionable, multi-year roadmap for kdelibs and kdebase-runtime and will examine issues of modularity, topicality and the inherent dichotomy between the KDE Platform as an application development framework (similar to Qt) and as a stand-alone platform to target (similar to, e.g. Windows, MacOS, etc.)
To me, this sprint marks an interesting point in the lifecycle of KDE 4, as we are now rethinking the structure of our platform.
Platform or Frameworks?
Last week, we had an interesting discussion wether the development libraries KDE software bases upon are called a platform or frameworks. I personally prefer to think of it in terms of frameworks, because that has a less exclusive nature to it. A platform sounds very much monolithic, while frameworks give a modular impression — and indeed, one of the goals of the Platform 11 sprint is modularity of our "platform".
Plasma Active and Platform11
One of the goals for me for participating in Platform 11 is to make our development frameworks more suitable for building non-desktop systems. There have already been efforts that work into this direction for quite some time (the platform build-time profiles come to mind, or recent work on libplasma2), but we haven’t yet had a focused meeting where we sat together to discuss our platform as a whole. That will likely mean a bit of restructuring in our libraries, deprecating some overly old stuff, and examining where we’re lacking a consistent API for modern needs. Geolocation comes to mind here, and rumours are that there’s an exile-kiwi coming with plans to Randa.
Last night, during dinner Kim asked me what I’m looking forward to in Randa other than technical and community bits. My answer was “watching the mountains”. As I’m living in the Netherlands, mountains are not a normal thing in sight, and the magnitude of those Swiss Alps keeps astonishing me. I’m also looking forward to those idle moments staring at the mountains.
We’ve been busy bees in the growing Plasma Active team, so it’s time to post some progress updates. In case you forgot, Plasma Active is a KDE project to create a desirable user experience for the device spectrum, with its first focus to create a system suitable for tablet computers. In my first post about Plasma Active, you can see the basic shell running on a 10 inch Viewsonic Viewtab. In this post, I’m using a Wetab to demo the current state of Plasma Active. The Wetab is one of our test devices. It’s a nice target device since it’s Intel Atom-based, which makes building Plasma Active a bit easier, and thus shortens our development-testing-deployment cycles considerable. The Wetab can currently be gotten from German Ebay for 219€ + shipping, so it’s also quite affordable.
Back to the software, though. Our focus in the past weeks has been two-fold, we’ve done a lot of “small fixes” which greatly improve the user experience. The other class of changes is less visible at this point, but still fun and exciting.
Virtual Keyboard Layout
The virtual keyboard is using a layout that is more suitable for tablet computers, containing more characters on the first, easily reachable “page” of it. This makes text input a lot less annoying (let’s face it, touchscreens are not ideal for typing as they lack haptic feedback, so it can only become so good). There’s still a bunch of things that would make the keyboard better, and of course it has its fair share of bugs, but it basically works and isn’t too annoying, either.
Top Panel and Window Switching
We’ve also done some work on the top panel, holding access to network, power management, the calendar and a bunch of other things. While the panel would slide out a bit in our early versions to make the hit area bigger, we found that this intermediate step is not necessary, we increased the default height of the panel a bit which works nicely. The panel is still meant to be slided out, but for a different purpose. We will be putting a strip of window previews in there, replacing the current appswitcher sitting in the top left corner. Most pieces for the new panel-and-window-switching mechanism are already in place, but it’s not finished yet.
Snazzy new Activity Switcher
During Tokamak, Marco has merged a new, snazzy Activity switcher into Plasma Active. This activity switcher offers a wheel-like interface which you slide in from the right. It has previews (or rather post-views ;)) of your activities, and you use a small slider on those previews to switch to an activity. (These activities right now provide spaces for different sets of widgets, but will be given more meaning thanks to the Contour project, which develops a semantic workspace framework for Plasma Active. As all the parts necessary to make basic activity handling in Plasma Active work, we’ve decided to merge this new switcher already, since the “old” one was really very basic, and wasn’t quite so intuitive, due to lack of visual feedback (i.e. previews).
Try it!
open-slx has created a new Plasma Active image, which can be run live off of a USB stick, you can find the latest version here (spot the plasma-active.current.iso). There are also openSUSE and Meego packages available (the latter being a bit less mature, but we’ve made really good progress in the past days.)
If Plasma Active has spawned your interest, or you would like to find out how you can get your software to run on and integrate well with Plasma Active, get in touch with us, either on IRC, or via our mailinglist. You can find more information on the Plasma Active pages on communitybase.
Our two big topics at Tokamak 5 are infrastructural changes and libplasma2, and Plasma Active. In a session yesterday, we discussed the Plasma Active shell, and how we want to interact with it. The discussion was very fruitful, and based on a mockup by Riccardo, we decided to implement a top panel that you can drag out, offering access to the window switcher, the “system tray”, and a couple of other things. That’s quite a big visual change from what we have right now, but it allows us to achieve a number of interaction cleanups. Let’s look in more detail what we’re doing here:
Window switching – The top panel has a horizontal window list, which you can use to switch between app windows and widgets in your workspaces. The window decoration is going away, windows can be closed from the window list. The present windows effect has this already implemented, as a trashcan you can swipe your window into. It works pretty well and is snazzy.
Semantic Resource Visualization – In order to display things like files, contacts, bookmarks, music, etc. we use separate QML elements for different uses (items in a listview, for example). The data comes directly from Nepomuk. This part is also starting to work, we can list different resources, and based on its type (defined in the ontologies), it will choose a suitable QML file to display this Thing in a suitable way and allow for interaction with it.
Storage of bookmarks – As most of the information we use in Plasma Active is coming from Nepomuk, we decided to store the bookmarks in there as well. The NFO Ontology has classes for Bookmark and Bookmark folder, which is what we’re using here. Last night I’ve restructured the metadataengine to make it easier to build special purpose dataengines on top of that. These dataengines allow for easy access and usage in QML / Plasma Quick.
Web Dashboard – I’m doing some work on a nice way to view your bookmarks, as interacting with the web is an important use-case of Plasma Active. We now have (cached) previews of webpages, we can use directly in QML. Combined with the dataengine that lists bookmarks, it’s now easy to implement a bookmarks browser, done entirely in Plasma Quick, shippable as architecture-independent package. Connecting these bits and pieces is next on th list.
Some of these things are working already, others materialise as we speak, some will surely stay on our list until after Tokamak, so we’ve got something to hack on when everybody’s back. :)
This week’s a crazy one, at least according to our cat. The fifth edition of Tokamak (the Plasma team’s sprint) is taking place at my house, so I’ve got the house packed with geeks hacking away at godly and ungodly times. It’s been great so far, but just as well too busy for me to blog, or even answer my emails. (Feeding the various animals here trumps that, sorry. ;-))
So, what’s been happening? We’ve designed, discussed, implemented stuff, fixed bugs left and right and had quite some fun doing that. Aaron has already talked about some of the things we’re working on, my personal focus is on two aspects:
Improving overall user experience in Plasma Active
Visualisation of resources coming from Nepomuk
Both are fun topics, and I’ll blog about them in more detail once things settle down a bit here. If you’re curious, you can update your Plasma Active installation already, and follow our progress. I’m updating the packages regularly, so that you won’t fall behind too far during our development progress.
One of the results of the UX sprint in Berlin which I’m really happy with is that it helped me frame some of the bigger ideas behind in my mind behind Plasma Active, and make it digestable for someone who hasn’t spent a lot of time yet thinking about it, and digesting these ideas.
As really nice example Celeste came up with is “The Box of Crayons“.
Let’s say, we as developers create a crayon, just one color, one thickness, a tool that is fine for jotting down a note on a piece of paper. There’s something magic about this crayon however: You can change it, and you can clone it nearly effortlessly. We start spreading around the clones of this crayon. An artist picks it up, and starts sketching with it, but she’s quickly unhappy with the crayon’s thickness, and the color isn’t very beautiful either (surprise, it’s made by a software developer, those don’t have the same visual tastebuds as many others). The artist takes the crayon, clones it a few times, changes the thickness of some, adjusts the colors of others. She takes a sheet of paper (same magical capabilities) and starts drawing. Happy with this new box of crayons, she tells her friends, and starts sharing it with others (now as a box of coloured crayons, in different colors with different stroke-styles. Others go ahead and add paper, canvases in different forms or shapes…
Applied to Plasma and Active, this means that we have to bring the traditional tasks of application developers to a wider group of people, and deliver the possibilities and infrastructure to share and change our creations. Creating a new “App” (a crayon, or a piece of paper) is not necessarily programming something new, but it can also be a specialized version of something that is already there — as long as it provides added value, it’s a useful addition. An interesting aspect here is that this ties in closely with the core values of Free software, yet provides an intriguing way of blurring the lines between creators and consumers.
Plasma provides these generic crayons with magical capabilities already today. We want these to be used, shared, adapted and combined into new, desirable tools.
I am in Berlin right now, for the KDE User Experience sprint. This sprint combines developers and designers into one group to exchange ideas, and discuss possible solutions we in the KDE community are running into. The sprint is kindly hosted by Relevantive, and sponsored by the KDE e.V.. For me personally, the focus is on Plasma Active. In order to make Plasma Active less abstract and give us all a clearer idea of what this is, I’ve brought two tablets running Plasma Active to show people what we’re working on, explaining the concepts while showing where we are right now. The reactions have been very positive and open so far, even if surely I wasn’t able to provide every detail we envision.
One of the goals I came here for is to evaluate and test Plasma Active’s concepts with a wider group of people, with more professional designers, and with people who have expertise in fields that are critical to Plasma Active’s success. This has proven very valuable so far. I’m quite happy with the results, and most of the ideas and concept we worked out with respect to adapting apps (and UIs) to the device spectrum do address the important problems we have. In this morning’s discussion, we also came up with some recommendations to not repeat mistakes others have made in the past.
Design vs Implementation
One of the things that we have to avoid is to mix design and implemenation. If we target a spectrum of devices, that doesn’t mean we can deliver one-size-fits-all solutions. The contrary is true: Every device has a special ‘use-case’ (in a lose meaning), it has special attributes that make the device special. Let me give one example: an app for a smartphone vs. an app for a tablet computer. The most obvious similarity is that they’re both touchscreen devices. This means that an app that works well on a smartphone would probably also run fine on a tablet. A smartphone technically is very much a subset of a tablet (oversimplified, yes). The usage pattern of a tablet is much different, however. Your smartphone may be used “on the run”, with an attention span of a few seconds, while you’re using the tablet on your couch, as a more relaxed way to go through your pile of emails — your not easily distracted though. Apps need to be designed for that, so it is not as easy as just making some screen adjustments. The app has to be made for a specific use-case.
Separate Designs with shared implementation
The solution is of course to design separate applications, that take all this into account (device-specifics, such as input methods, screen size, etc.) and usage patterns (“What is this app used for?”) The design for a specific device has to be made on a blank sheet of paper. In the implementation phase, Plasma’s architecture comes in really handy. As Plasma is very portable and full of generic components for small tasks, we will often end up re-using 90% of the code. The thing we have to watch out for is to not let this ease of development lure us into laziness on the design side.
Plasma Active is creating a lot of blank sheets of paper, waiting to be filled. We need designers that want to help us fill these pages with what becomes the blueprint for desirable interfaces. If this is something you, as a designer (visual-, graphics-, interaction-, product-) find interesting, get in contact with us. We need you.
As we’re working on issues central to how we all (KDE and Qt hackers) develop, I’m sure you’re impatiently waiting for results to pour onto the Internet. While our first focus is on personal interaction and using the facetime and “high personal bandwidth” to solve hard problems, you can get at least an overall impression of the direction of our work, as we’re tracking our results on the 
What is this platform11 sprint about? (Randa’s trainstation only has 2 platforms, one towards Zermatt, one towards Visp. That’s probably not it.) The wiki page about the sprint makes it more clear, however:
The virtual keyboard is using a layout that is more suitable for tablet computers, containing more characters on the first, easily reachable “page” of it. This makes text input a lot less annoying (let’s face it, touchscreens are not ideal for typing as they lack haptic feedback, so it can only become so good). There’s still a bunch of things that would make the keyboard better, and of course it has its fair share of bugs, but it basically works and isn’t too annoying, either.
During Tokamak, Marco has merged a new, snazzy Activity switcher into Plasma Active. This activity switcher offers a wheel-like interface which you slide in from the right. It has previews (or rather post-views ;)) of your activities, and you use a small slider on those previews to switch to an activity. (These activities right now provide spaces for different sets of widgets, but will be given more meaning thanks to the 
This week’s a crazy one, at least according to our cat. The fifth edition of Tokamak (the Plasma team’s sprint) is taking place at my house, so I’ve got the house packed with geeks hacking away at godly and ungodly times. It’s been great so far, but just as well too busy for me to blog, or even answer my emails. (Feeding the various animals here trumps that, sorry. ;-))