The Decision on appletstrip vs Contour containment (was:re orging of plasma mobile repository)

[Marco Martin]

Hi all,

as everybody knows, right now we have a quite odd situation that we
have at the moment what it looks like two different plasma workspace
for the tabet, since what starts with plasma-tablet loads a workspace
with applet strips as main screen for the activities

plasma-contour has the main contour containment, is focused on
resource icons instead, but capability to put plasmoids will come as
well.

considered that a) this gives an impression of a not clear direction
and b) we don't have so much resources to do one interface, let alone
two ;)

that said, the two main containments serve well two very different
kinds of scenarios:

* the contour one serves better the concept of "activity", what i'm
doing now, that is more around files, contacts, running applications,
whatever. it also serves pretty well as container for plasmoids that
can be very specific for a task (classical example, weather forecast
in a trip planning activity)

* the applet strip serves in a much better way a quite different use
case: applets that give me informations about news, social networking
and whatever, this goes better there because a) it's not really
attached to an activity, i just want to glance at twitter ;) and b)
for a pure ui point of view, the contour ontainment has vertical
scrolling, and all of those plasmoid have vertical scrolling as well,
so they work only on a surface with no or horizontal scrolling. the
contour containment could be adapted, but would require a redesign of
the ui (and there would always be the reason a)

and let's not forget the web dashboard containment, another kind of
main screen. also letting the user choose the kind of containment
while is fine on the desktop, sounds quite confusing on a mobile
ideally simpler environment.

so, after talking about it with Aaron and Sebastian for a loong time,
that's the decision we came with:

* we will have a single, only one tablet user interface, at that will
be the contour ux
* the appletstrip is something different, that something different could be:
    * a separate application, something that is even launched by hand
from the user, and will have a default set of widgets: at least rss
feed and identica
    * a separate screen in the tablet ui, almost identical as the sal
now in plasma-tablet: a panel that is dragged from the bottom

in both cases there will be only one set, not influenced by activities

technically, the second option is way easier to achieve, but i'm
concerned that the tablet ui becomes way too complex (both in user
interaction and memory consumption)  it has waay too much chrome going
on into it already ;)

the second solution would instead be a bit longer to achieve (needs a
plasma shell that would take i guess 3-4 days to write) take more
memory when everything is running, but stoppable by the user.

i lean towards the second solution, but since the first is very easy
to do i can start with that one so can be tested (and eventually kept
or transitioned to the second).

so the bottom line, and most important thing is that there would  be
only a single tablet ui left.
i would also move the main contour containment in the plasma mobile
repo, to make it very easy to package: since the balsam image wants to
ship with more stable stuff, the recommendation screen would remain in
the contour repo (and not installed) while the contour activity screen
would instead be picked (and that one is working well enough nowdays,
since receives ~90% of development time ;)

ideas/comments?

Cheers,
Marco Martin