Plasma on MID, take 2

[Michael Rudolph]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 18:42, Marco Martin <notmart at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> other things are really chained by their nature to be an "application"
> presented as is, like games or things like a media player or a web browser,
> that are pretty central on a mid are really tied to the concept of application

Hi Marco,

right, those are definitely the tougher pieces of the puzzle.

I really don't agree with you, and I'm probably just nit-picky with
words here, but software isn't anything "by nature". You create it,
and you surely know this better than I do :-), to be whatever you want
it to be. Of course when you are not starting from scratch,
limitations are imposed on your design by the platform on top of which
you are building. But troubles on that front are basically just an
indication that something's wrong with your platform.

Besides my nit-picking, another thing I'm seeing differently, is the
web browser. To me it's just a gateway to access information or
functionality (i.e. wikipedia and google docs or generally documents
and web apps). Plasma is already shaking at the arbitrary notion that
these things have to be accessed through a web browser; the
micro-blogging plasmoid comes to mind. So when working on plasma-mid
it might be better to not talk about a web browser, but rather about
information or functionality (that lives in the cloud). Basically to
just think about "what the user is actually doing", like looking up
information or collaborating with friends on a text document.

But before I get into preaching mode (again :-), let me try to come up
with some actionable remarks.

I'd like to challenge us to come up with, say, 10 to 20 use cases or
scenarios of using a MID. Unless of course we already have those, then
I'd just like to know, where to find them. :-)

Those use cases would bring some context to the various tasks people
can do on their MIDs.
For example while we all want "a web browser" on our devices, when our
use case says: I'm in a library and want to see how others rated this
book. We might be able to pull that off without the user knowing he's
using the web browser. He could start up the camera by opening the lid
and next to the regular shutter button is a (smaller) button, called:
identify product. Clicking it will snap a picture but also try to find
a bar code in it. Tapping the identified bar code fires of a search,
whose results allow you to buy the book, see amazon customer ratings,
find the book on google books and other related things. There's a lot
of web and and a lot of browsing involved here, but not really a web
browser.

Games could also be integrated without an application grid. For
example through the temporal UI, which I imagine to basically be a
time line. Let's say I'm in between meetings and want to squeeze in a
little game of tetris. Well what I do is navigate to "now"; to the
space between my meetings and start to zoom in. When you zoomed in
enough all the things start to appear, that can be squeezed into this
little time frame. Say tetris, solitair, mine sweeper, but also items
from your todo list might turn up. "Write Autobiography" will not turn
up, but "Call doctor to see if results are in" will. I think a lot can
be done without falling back onto application centrism. And if we all
work together we will surely come up with solutions that are less
contrived than the ones I offered. :-)

Basically, now, we would only need eight to eighteen use cases. ;-)

I'll create a page on techbase and after a little discussion here, we
can add use cases one by one. What do you think? What would you want
to do with your MID?

michael

> on a small device it means mostly "switch my device to media player mode" or
> things like that
> and then yeah, if all those "activities" are implemented as applications or as
> well.. activities is something that has to be totally hidden from the user
>
> i think an initial icon grid that mostly says chose how you want to use your
> device, multimedia? communications? whatever
> it will of course not have to contain all the cruft menus have in a standard
> linux distributions
>