Introducing myself (and maybe the team as well)

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hi Marcelo ...

On Wednesday 27 August 2008, marcelo oliveira wrote:
> Cheers from Brazil,

what can i say other than, "welcome to the party!"

with the plasma-mid project, we are right now working on a fingerable interface 
desgin. currently the rought idea is this:

the main interface is broken into two areas: a small top "control" bar and a 
larger content area below.

the control bar shows useful global and contextual items, such as:

	* battery, network and other status
	* a place for system notifications to be visually related to (as opposed to 
just floating randomly somewhere on screen)
	* title of the current activity
	* some global actions (home, close activity, etc)

the control bar will be made up of two main widgets: the title bar and the 
status area. in turn, the status area contains other widgets, just set to very 
small sizes. this lets us re-use desktop components such as the battery widget 
without rewriting any code. =)

(as an unexpected bonus, on the desktop it will allow us to dock things like 
the battery monitor into the status area ... interesting how these efforts have 
positive effects in both directions)

the status area will be collapsable, so it should be able to survive rotations 
without becoming completely useless (i do wonder if on rotate whether will 
want a top and a bottom bar though? hrm.)

rotation is not currently supported, but that's because we've only just begun 
;)

for the content area, we want to provide two main widgets with plasma-mid, 
each of which would be run full screen:

* an "application" launcher
* a widget dashboard

the launcher will use nice large fingerable buttons that are attractive; this 
means that unlike hildon which has a "desktop" with a launch menu, we want to 
dedicate the whole screen real estate (minus the top bar) to the launcher 
which should allow us to make it easy to use with fingers and visually 
attractive.

we want to have categories in the launcher, so you can see your favourite 
items, just games, etc.

finally, one of the "applications" will be what we call a "dashboard", which is 
simply an area for a bunch of widgets (information from the web, local media 
viewers, clocks, contacts listings, amusements, etc) that the user may arrange 
to their liking

additionally, it will be possible to run such widgets as if they were 
applications (which is why i keep putting quotes around the term "application" 
=). to the user, they should be presented seemlessly and as no different than 
"real" applications.

this will allow users to access a large body of content and widgets that are 
very nicely set up already to work on such screen sizes as the N810 has, 
without the user actually having to be aware of the difference between a "real" 
application and a widget.

ok, that's quite a bit for one email, but hopefully gives you an idea of where 
we're headed.

we're absolutely open to ideas and input, even if they aren't the same as what 
we are already thinking =)

if you'd like to do mockups, either functional or static, we'd be glad to have 
them. if you have questions, we'll be happy to answer them. if we have 
usability questions and you can answer them ... all the better.

we work iteratively and collectively. this means that while we have people who 
generally "own" parts of plasma, there are no "you can't touch that ever!" 
rules. changes made to shared parts are discussed here and agreed on before 
they go into the repository. everyone is welcome to experiment in the 
playground on anything they'd like without going through that process. we also 
tend to take things one step at a time instead of trying for grand "it's all 
complete in one motion" types of changes. this allows us to remain nimble and 
gather as much input from as many people and places as possible, while 
preventing the code from becoming a chaotic mess lacking any sort of design.

it should be fairly easy for you to get started with the team here, and if you 
have students who'd like to work on projects, even highly experimental ones 
(we have the playground repository for just that scenario!), they'd also be 
welcome to join in the fun.

i look forward to working with you and your team ...


(we really ought to set up a wiki page at 
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Plasma for this information!)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/attachments/20080827/d1090c10/attachment.sig