Bangarang Active?

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi Andrew,

On Wednesday, April 13, 2011 20:47:48 Marco Martin wrote:
> On Wednesday 13 April 2011, Andrew Lake wrote:
> > I'm developer of Bangarang and I'm curious if there would be any
> > interest in having Bangarang eventually as an Active App?

Absolutely!

> of course, the more applications there are, the better it is, and bangarang
> is a pretty neat application :)
> 
> > There is already what I hope is fairly decent separation between data
> > and visualization. The underlying design tries to follow the MVC
> > principle and purposefully allows separate UI development.  From my
> > normal desktop testing and use I'm thinking Bangarang might fit into
> > category 2 from Aaron's blog, but I've never actually tested it on a
> > touch device.

Right now, it does. I've had a quick look at Bangarang a few weeks ago, in 
order to evaluate its usefulness for touchscreens. I think the main issues 
I've found were too small controls, and too little gesture support (swipe-
scrollling in playlists, for example). There is, from the top of my head also 
quite some interesting stuff in tooltips, which is close to impossible to 
sensibly use on touchscreens.

Overall, it didn't feel miles away from a good touch-screen application, the 
applications look & feel is already quite OK. It's a really nice application, 
congrats to that.

I'd love to see an Bangarang Active. :-)

> that is quite a good news, probably a port of the "chrome elements" to qml
> could be not too hard so
> 
> > If Bangarang makes sense as a potantial Active App, I have a few
> > questions: - Bangarang uses Nepomuk for media library info, playback
> > statistics. Is something like this out of scope for how Nepomuk is
> > intended to be used in Plasma Active?
> 
> yes it is, just look at monday's announcements about Contour :)

And with "yes it is" (which is the wrong answer to "is Nepomuk out of scope?" 
Marco means: Nepomuk is there on Plasma Active. :-) Contour uses it as well, 
and I'm working on what once will become a set of data-driven "widgets" 
(Plasma Quick components), that are backed by Nepomuk data. I've just 
yesterday committed a metadata Plasma::DataEngine to kde:plasma-
mobile/dataengines/metadata. An bare bones applet (which is kinda buggy) can 
be found in applets/resourcelist, just to give you an idea how this kind of 
stuff could look like in QML / Plasma Quick.

> > - I was hoping for the 2.1 release to focus on activity-aware
> > playlists and media semantics (highest rated/frequently
> > played/recently played). Would something like this fit into the
> > current vision for Plasma Active?

Absolutely. This might also tie in nicely with the Contour recommendation 
system Sebastian Trüg is working on. You guys should talk =)

> activities are pretty important in plasma active, as the name suggests
> 
> > - There are some specific interaction mechanics that I'm not entirely
> > clear about regarding availability from current/proposed Active
> > libraries: Multiple selection in a list, Touch and hold, Pop-up
> > menu/selection list.

We're still at a very early stage with respect to standard interaction 
schemes, unfortunately. I'll bring this topic up at the upcoming UX sprint, 
and we will sit together during Tokamak to identify these UI design patterns 
for which we need standard, high-level solutions for. You raise a very good 
point. :)

> > - I may need a little guidance on whether to modify the existing C++
> > UI code or just develop a new UI using QML. No worries either way.
> 
> I would say a QML ui with plasma components would be the way to go..
> for media apps there is still the problem of video widgets in qgraphicsview
> that are still.. meh :/

Worst case: We'll use a window atom to place a windows on top of the canvas, 
for fullscreen, we'll want that anyway. But yeah, meh.

You can find us also on #active on Freenode IRC, if you want to quickly 
discuss something, or have a question, and of course the plasma-devel at kde.org 
list is a useful resource with much experience.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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