"Big picture" design one release cycle ahead?

[David Talmage]

On Saturday, October 27, 2012 10:55:37 AM Björn Balazs wrote:
> ...
> Let's get in touch with our users - try to understand what is working
> good and where improvements are needed, as part of the preparation of
> the next sprint. And after the sprint, let's again talk to them and
> see if we managed to substantially improve the perceived quality.
> ...

I'm a user. I'm also a developer by profession, so I probably fall into Inge 
Wallin's category #1, the tinkerers.  Other commitments prevent me from 
getting involved in PA development.  I'm happy to be only a user and to try 
out PA and report about what works.

I chose to run PA on my 32GB 3G WeTab because 4tiitoo seems to be getting out 
of the business of tablets. I think the activites metaphor makes sense on a 
tablet for the way I want to use mine.  I don't have a use for activites 
on my desktop computer.

On my PA3 WeTab, I have three activites.

1. An activity for general web surfing and reading books. I'm currently reading 
"Version Control with Git".  On my WeTab, the PDF viewer was good enough.  It 
handled screen rotation correctly.  In portrait orientation, a page was almost 
as big as in a real book.  The PDF viewer wasn't especially finger-friendly. 
The one in PA3 is almost OK.  It needs to support a portrait view.  I like the 
page thumbnails.

2. An activity for e-mail, calendar, and contacts.  I use kontact-touch 
occasionally for these PIM activities. I get e-mail through an IMAP account.  
I keep my calendar and contacts on a DAViCal server. This seems to be working.  
I like it a lot. A better soft keyboard would improve my user experience 
signficantly.

3. An activity for my trip to Berlin for Qt Developer Days.  This is 
interesting.  It's the first activity I created on PA3.  I have the map 
application in the activity and I have bookmarks in it for my hotel and the 
conference center and a place or two I want to visit.  I have some German 
language books and bookmarks for German dictionaries, the Goethe Institute, 
and a Google map.  I'm having fun with this one.


I'd like to use PA for watching movies and listening to music.  Bangarang 
crashes too easily for this.  I think it knows about only ogg media, which is 
fine, but I have a lot of files in the various mpeg formats (2, 3, 4) and some 
other popular but not free ones.

There are a few things I'd like to see the PA team work on immediately.  These 
things would make PA a joy to use.

1. The PA shell must not crash.

2. The soft keyboard must work all of the time.  I've encountered plenty of 
times, particulary after booting, when I could not get the keyboard to 
display.  This is frustrating when PA is asking for the key that unlocks my 
KDE wallet.

2.a. The soft keyboard must not be tedious to use.  It's tiresome in the 
konsole application. For konsole, the addition of Esc, ctrl, and arrow keys 
would be ideal. I know that's not what the PA team thinks is important for the 
general user and they are probably right.

3. Better PDF/E-book reader with portrait display and the ability to annotate.

4. Support for all popular media types. This includes a media player that 
doesn't crash.

5. Bluetooth support.  I would hook up my BT GPS receiver and some BT 
speakers.

David Talmage