KDE Connect integration

[Albert Vaca]

+kdeconnect mailing list

Hi Kai Uwe,

Sorry for not having a look at this until now.

The main reason to not integrate with Solid in the first place was because
kdelibs was frozen due to the transition to Frameworks 5. Also, not using
standard notifications was because limitations in KDE4's notification
system (and a personal dislike with it :P) that were going to be solved in
Plasma 5.

All this reasons should be obsolete now, and I think it would be awesome if
we can move the battery, notifications and file browser features from our
plasmoid to the Battery plasmoid, the Notifications plasmoid and the
Dolphin sidebar.

The original KDE Connect plasmoid was just a workaround for the said
limitations and still feels hackish to me. So, I would be happy to even
remove it (or at least, have it disabled by default), and have everything
integrated with the desktop.

Using standard notifications will even benefit the integration with other
desktops and make KDE Connect less Plasma-only, which is one of the project
goals for this year.

I've seen the CR with WIP changes to Solid (I saw that Alex already
reviewed it, but I still want to have a look at the code). I'm looking
forward for this project to move forward and I'm more than happy to make
the changes needed in the KDE Connect desktop client for
this integration to happen :D

Albert

On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Kai Uwe Broulik <kde at privat.broulik.de>
wrote:

> Hi Albert,
>
> first of all thank you for your work on KDE Connect!
>
> At my workplace a couple of colleagues switched over from Windows to use
> Plasma 5 and they're really enjoying KDE Connect. This made me think about
> how
> to better integrate it into our shell and make it an integral part of our
> user
> experience rather than a 3rd party kind of thing.
>
> I talked to the usability people and they told me "Only when it feels as if
> the phone were connected via USB then it's done right" which makes sense; I
> know that initially you added support to kdelibs solid to support showing
> the
> phone battery in the battery monitor. What were the reasons for not further
> pursuing that idea?
>
> Lukas Tinkl and I agreed that it makes sense, and we're totally willing to
> support, having a KDE Connect backend right in Solid itself - so I looked
> at
> your kdelibs-kdeconnect clone repo, ported it, and started improving on it.
>
> To me the most important aspects of workspace integration with KDE Connect
> is:
> - Have the battery status shown in the battery monitor [1]
> - Have the device accessible through the device notifier [2] (that could
> potentially enable us to have it added to Places automatically rather than
> KDE
> Connect being required to handle that manually)
> - Show notifications in the notification applet
>
> The latter is what Gnome nowadays does and also makes sense. I think the
> initial need for a separate plasmoid for that came from the limitations of
> the
> one in the 4.x times, right? Nowadays we can update and remove
> notifications
> properly, we could potentially also allow adding silent notifications that
> don't yield a popup, and add additional custom data so we could group the
> notifications by device and separate them from the system ones.
>
> Another area worth of investigation might be promoting KDE Connect within
> the
> Plasma Workspace; for instance, when, for the first time, you plug in your
> Android device via USB, or when you try to send files to it over Bluetooth
> a
> popup could tell you "Hey, with KDE Connect you can copy stuff around with
> ease, control your music, and much more! [Pair with phone] [QR Code for
> play
> store link]"
>
> I apologize for this long Email and am looking forward to hearing from you!
>
> Cheers,
> Kai Uwe
>
> [1] http://wstaw.org/m/2015/04/01/kdeconnectbattery.png Sorry for the
> German
> UI ;)
> [2] http://wstaw.org/m/2015/04/01/kdeconnectdevicenotifier.png
>
>
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