Proposal: Plasma Active Three end of August

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

Hi all,
I just wanted to give feedback on where I see PA3 standing as of now:

On Wednesday 08 August 2012 14:52:32 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> > (only thing too much unfinished in plasma-mobile master at the moment is
> > the locale settings module, should be disabled)

Done.

> Another thing which seems unfinished is the power settings module. Currently
> there are power settings in the configuration launched from the battery
> Plasmoid (i.e. the regular ones from Plasma Desktop) as well as those in
> the Settings app. I always try to fiddle around with both and end up not
> knowing which ones are actually effective (apart from the defaults in the
> Settings App module looking pretty suboptimal to me). Therefore we need to
> either remove the desktop power settings and make ours actually work or
> remove ours. We can#t have both.

The new battery applet does not allow access to the desktop power settings, so 
that part is done. 
However the desktop KCM is still there and its settings are different to those 
in the PA Settings app. Does our app completely override the Desktop 
Powersaving KCM's settings or could they still be conflicting? Conflicting 
settings would be a huge problem. Could we just get rid of the desktop 
settings module completely?

> And then there is the resource browser which wasn't in an end-user-ready
> state last time I checked. Marco and me have already talked about what
> needs to be improved during Akademy (and some of it has already been
> implemented), yet I don't know what the current status is on that front.

I really like the improvements in the resource browser. Great work, Marco! :)

- One big problem still in there is the fact that the drag & drop "ghost" is 
not shown while the finger is still positioned over any resource icon. This 
gives the impression that the dragging wasn't recognized until you drag past 
the other resource icons. I just did a "one person usability test" on this and 
the outcome was pretty much disastrous. The user simply thought that dragging 
didn't work at all.
The dragging operation definitely needs to be visualized right after it's 
started.

Then there a few things that could still be optimized (although I don't see 
them as a must-have for PA3):
- The drag & drop "ghost" feels a little weird with the vertical offset. 
Placing it directly at the cursor position would certainly make the dragging 
feel more direct. The problem would of course be that you couldn't see where 
you're dragging anymore. Could the ghost be made slightly transparent?
- The "Current Activity" filter is nice, but it would be much more useful if 
the Activitieswere drop targets like the tags. That way users could very 
easily add resources to activities without having to go through SLC or the Add 
Items dialog for each association.
- I think the concave effect actually does help users to recognize that they 
can drop stuff "into" tags. Could you make the "holes" a little deeper to make 
it even more clear?

> We also definitely need much more extensive testing compared to the previous
> release. There are many small things which are often affected by
> regressions (especially everything related to Activities and resources)
> that only show when you actually try to _use_ your device (like moving
> files from and to USB sticks, adding and removing resources of many
> different kinds to Activities, using private Activities etc.). It often
> happens to me that when I install an image on my Wetab and play around with
> it a bit, everything seems fine. But then when I use it more extensively,
> problems start appearing all over the place. And I personally would like to
> be able to show PA3 to someone without having to fear that he or she might
> do something that I causes all sorts of bugs to pop up.

There are still some bugs left which I'd call release blockers, I'll add 
comments to the corresponding reports.

> Another thing is: Which hardware and which base system do we want it to run
> smoothly on? I don't know about other devices and platforms, but at least PA
> on Mer on Wetab currently has several problems, from a blank locking screen
> to uncontrolled sleeping to the power button shutting down instead of
> locking. If these problems don't appear on other devices and we don't care
> about Wetab, I'm fine with that. But if we want to show PA3 running on a
> Wetab without embarrassing ourselves, there are still quite a few things to
> do.

I haven't experienced any "narcolepsy" with the latest Devel image yet, so 
perhaps this is fixed. The same goes for the blank locking screen and the power 
button shutting down. Very nice :)

Of course there are still the DPI-related problems, pretty much all buttons 
are hardly tappable at all. I assume this can't be fixed for PA3, but if we are 
to expand the spectrum of supported devices, DPI-awareness is an absolute must 
for PA4.

All in all I think we're on a very good way, but some things still need to be 
done to get a releasable codebase.

Thank you for all the great work fixing bugs (something I sadly can't help with 
at all),
Thomas