Three Important Things for Plasma Active 3

[Aaron J. Seigo]

Hi :)

So I've been mentally chewing on the question of "what are the three important 
messages for PA3?" Some suggestions were made in a previous thread on this 
topic, and several of them really resonated. What follows is built on the 
foundations of this input .. so thanks to everyone who contributed there :)

The point of 3it (i hesitate to turn it into a proper acronym ... ;) is to 
give us a shared message that we can communicate outwardly in a consistent and 
effective manner.

I think we need not one but *two* sets of 3it for PA3: one for people who know 
nothing about PA, and one for the people who have been following our progress 
to date. The first 3it will track with us from release to release and should 
become our long term messaging track; the 2nd is our iteration message: what 
are we bringing new that we haven't previously.

So ... Three Important Things about Plasma Active;

1) Activities -> Plasma Active is a mobile user interface focused on personal 
productivity. It achieves this through the information-centric concept of 
"Activities" wherein a person can have the life experiences they are most 
engaged in reflected in the computing device. Whether it's a short term event 
such as "a party next week", a topical endeavour such as a research project or 
business report or a long term interest such as "parasailing" or "tropical 
fish", these become topics which the device reflect as you experience them. 
Information in the form of books, documents, images, videos, web sites, people 
and more are collected together to form the definition of each activity the 
person defines, and the device can then be requested to focus on a given 
activity. This means that one device can become your exclusive party planner 
one minute and with the flick of your finger morph into the quarterly report 
review project that you have to deliver next week. The device reflects who you 
are and what you are doing.

2) Useful from the moment you turn it on: we aim to create a useful 
productivity environment complete with essential tools such as book readers, 
groupware, content delivery systems, file managers and more. This makes Plasma 
Active not just a starting point for a mobile experience, but a complete 
mobile experience right from the start.

3) Freedom -> There is no vendor lock-in, no design behind closed doors, no 
code kept behind a royalty structure or other pay-wall, no artificial technical 
barriers to adoption and extension. This makes Plasma Active the perfect 
platform for custom application building taken to a whole new level: not only 
can your write "an app", you can build an entire device experience ... no 
barriers, only possibilities. This is what drives our collaborative approach.



Three Important Things about Plasma Active Three:

1) Apps: Plasma Active Three brings numerous new and powerful applications all 
designed with easy-to-use touch-based interfaces. These include:

* an Add Ons app that speaks to a Free software content server
* a file manager that incorporates tags, timelines and content discovery: want 
to see all your books from last year? No problem. Want to mannage your videos? 
Simple. Want to see all your images tagged as being from your vacation last 
month? One touch.
* an eBook reader that integrates seamlessly with both the file manager and Add 
Ons apps, so seamlessly you may not even notice it's there!
* Alarms: a simple thing, but so useful to have on a mbile device
* News Reader: a beautiful touch interface to keep up with all your favourite 
online news sources

Existing applications were also enhanced, such as the improved settings and 
web browsing experiences. Each release sees incremental improvements to 
existing applications in addition to the release of new ones.

2) Performance and stability: compared to Plasma Active 2, Three really flies. 
>From faster boot times to vastly improved application launch performance, the 
experience is much smoother. Opening the image viewer, for instance, has gone 
from taking a noticably long time to start (5+ seconds on many devices) to ~1 
second on the same devices. 

3) Upgraded OS: the base operating system used as the reference development 
platform, and which we build our reference images on, is now Mer, which is the 
community continuation of the MeeGo, Maemo and Moblin efforts. Mer offers Plasma 
Active fresh kernel and user space packages which allows Plasma Active to take 
advantage of the latest developments in Linux based systems. This has brought 
significant improvements in performance and new under-the-hood features that 
the user will notice in the form of things such as a nicer and more featureful 
network experience (Need to access a VPN from your tablet? No problem!), an 
improved on-screen keyboard and more. Mer, with its vibrant development 
community focused on open development and collaboration, also reflects our core 
values and allows us to work on advancements at the OS level with other 
companies who are also working in this space.


Ok, so those are my thoughts / ramblings / suggestions. Feedback very welcome. 
Nothing in the above is a "sacred cow" ... if we come up with a better idea 
for any point or sub-point above, we can and should use it :)

Also keep in mind that the above is the verbose version. Next step will be 
pare each point above down to 2-3 key phrases which we can use in passing, 
with the rest of the content being our "back story" for those phrases. This 
gives us the ability to go from the "soundbite sizzle" to the "supporting 
steak" in conversation.

Sound bites -> expansion of concepts that pique the audience's interest -> in 
depth exploration of Plasma Active (hopefully including sth hands-on) -> ??? -
> profit ;)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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