RFC: runtime switching between desktop and device UI

[Marco Martin]

Hi all,

this is more of a crazy idea for the future (probably even after PA3)

we see some devices that are basically tablets that can be docked to a 
keyboard becoming small laptops, such as the transformer or the surface (and 
the 3 billion surface knockoffs that will appear shortly ;)

One thing of active was about the importance of having device specific ui, so 
probably the interface of the tablet mode won't go too well with the "light 
laptop" mode and vice versa.

Since we have now the shells as different executables, as well as kwin vs 
kwinactive with different configurations, i was thinking: why not providing a 
config ui to allow switching on the fly without killing all the apps?
basically would be a matter of:
* At the beginning the switch will be manual: either an app to do that or an 
icon in the workspace
* The mouse cursor theme should change dinamically from the completely 
invisible one to the default one
* The splash screen should be launched again, since is going to be a long 
procedure
* The plasma-device shell and the kwinactive windowmanager should be stopped
* plasma-desktop and normal kwin(with different settings) should be started

This of course will be possible to be only partial: the running applications 
would stay as they are, but at least the user would have a workspace that 
would allow to launch the normal Calligra instead of Calligra active.

Now, if we stretch the imagination a bit, we can imagine a future where the 
desktop apps are done in qml as well with desktop components, we can imagine 
the actual ui of the app morphing dinamically... but this is a looong term 
plam :D


I've dumped ideas on that here on the wiki:
http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Tasks#On_the_fly_switching_from_Desktop_to_touch_screen_UI

everybody is invited to dump ideas there ;)

Cheers, 
Marco Martin