Welcome to 4.3.

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 07 January 2009, Marco Martin wrote:
> On Wednesday 07 January 2009, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > Hello everyone.
>
> everybody: heeello aaron :p
>
> > But the real fun, of course, is 4.3. What are we going to work on? What
> > will we do?
>
> what we do every night pinky... try to take over the world!
>
> > Well, there's obviously stuff in 4.2 that can use polishing and work and
> > there's always the enjoyable business of making things prettier and
> > faster.
> >
> > I would personally like to see us concentrate in 4.3 on *making things*
> > with the framework we have errected here. We've spent the last year on a
> > kick ass framework, let's spend 2009 blowing people's minds with what you
> > can build with it.
> >
> > For 4.3 I'm going to focus on community, sociability and media.
> >
> > No, I'm not focussing on things other than Plasma! I mean I want to focus
> > on making Plasma something that keeps you in touch with the KDE community
> > and your own communities. Something that helps, rather than gets in the
> > way, of you being social. Something that encourages the use of media more
> > pervasively and more enjoyably.
>
> bridging better with other applications like kopete could be a good start
> :) (not that i know exactly what i'm meaning but well, yeah...)

keep turning it over and over in your imagination, and i'm sure you'll 
eventually figure out what you're meaning and come up with something great.

one thing i'd love to see is the ability to drop a kopete contact onto plasma 
and have it be a "live" icon for that person.

oh, which reminds me of a very old idea: being able to drop plasmoids 
generated from inside applications would be awesome. so an app could add a 
plasma/widget mimetype to their QDrag, which plasma would accept, and then 
stream the contents (the zip file containing everything in it; with KConfigXt 
it is even possible to customize the default settings!) across the plasma 
which would then install that widget just for that instance. when the widget 
is closed in plasma, it would automatically uninstall the package as well.

it would be nice to make this as easy as possible for applications to manage.

so many neat ideas out there to implement =)

> > For me, this means a number of projects I'll be starting:
> >
> > * The Make A Widget Foundation (not sure if that's funny anywhere else
> > but North America): make every myspacer able to make and share widgets! *
> > The Plasma Design Studio; I've been working on design concepts since
> > Akademy around this and have some, imo anyways, pretty decent ideas on
> > how to do it
>
> hmm, wouldn't we need some aid by qt like q qgraphicswidget based designer?
> or we will embark in the adventure of implementing everything  just by us?

no to both =) at first it will be mostly a place to write scripts with at text 
editor, edit the metadata.desktop file with a nice interface, edit kconfigxt 
files, add images and ui files (we could embed designer if we wanted for that; 
that's not too hard these days apparently), etc...

drag and drop creation of widgets will come after the initial infrastructure 
is there.

the initial target audience for this will be the type of person who can do web 
development. they don't need fancy drag and drop UIs, but they do need a lot 
of hand-holding and C++ isn't a real option. (not because they're stupid, but 
because they don't have the time or energy to learn that much just to make a 
little widget)

> > 	* Improving the Basic JavaScript engine more and more
> > 	* Implementing that security framework!
> >
> > * Plasma Meets World: this is the JOLIE work that must finally make it
> > into libplasma so that people can discover a new level of
> > interoperability and power with their computers, and so Fabricio doesn't
> > hang me by my toes ;)
> >
> > * Media Center: This is the one I'm least sure about ... but ...
> > something to discuss at Tokamak for sure.
>
> i would really love that, maybe not a mythtv like full featured monster but
> a pretty basic thin that features a cool looking fullscreen media browser
> and manager, now how intergrating with existing things like mythtv and
> amarok is an open issue, given our resurces dunno if could make it for 4.3
> but well is one of the reasons of my video widget in  playground :p

i think if we start small and with reasonable expectations we can do great 
things with it.

i've pretty much given up on the idea of xbmc, mythtv, linuxmce, etc working 
with any of the desktops. they have too much on their plate keeping them busy 
and they are really too interested in this idea of stand alone media centers 
that they fail to appreciate the possibilities of the desktop.

i've seen what comes with both vista and macOS and neither are exactly 
sophisticated UIs. that's our competition, really. where they are 
sophisticated is in the device integration, things like the ability for vista 
to connect to an xbox. though ... it's flakey. i actually have an xbox in the 
house now for P (a gift from a friend) and have tried hooking up a vista pc 
over the network to it via the vista media center. holy moley is it not easy 
and even once it claims the connection is there, it usually isn't.

anyways ... imo we can work towards a single user use case scenario ... if 
it's possible for the user to go into a full-screen browse-your-media, play-
your-media basic interface (nothing fancy and full blown like kaffeine or 
amarok), we'll be golden.

then we can look at working with things like dlna and uPnp, but that can all 
be future work.

we should just focus on that single user experience first. keeping it simple 
at each step will make it achievable.

> a thing kinda coupled with that, since a media center would be a browse
> stuff type of thing is itemviews (deadly useful also in other areas), now

esp ++pretty ones. they don't need to be as full featured and "serious" as the 
ones in, say, kmail ... but they should be pretty and damn easy to use. 

> aaand the big thing of course:
> plasma-mid: this one as far i understood doesn't depend totally from us,
> but any development on that?

yes, that's another area for R&D =)
 
> > * new applet browser window
>
> maybe a gallery with screenshots or something like that...

yes, i want it to be much more visual than what we have now.

> > ... btw ... I think that if we just keep doing what we've been doing and
> > keep having fun at it, we're going to BLOW MINDS with 4.3. =)
> >
> > Hugs ...
>
> /me hugs back...
> dunno if what i wrote makes any sense or is just a flu-driven delirium but

hehe.. no, you made lots of sense. get well soon!

-- 
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 Qt Software

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