Welcome to 4.3.

[Michael Rudolph]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 21:35, Marco Martin <notmart at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday 09 January 2009, Michael Rudolph wrote:
>> 2009/1/7 Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org>:
>> >> 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 =)
>>
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> I'm not sure spying on the competition counts as R&D :-), but those
>> who haven't seen it already, might want to take a look at Palm's new
>> Pre.
>>
>> I've only seen a rather bad video on gizmodo of the official unveiling
>> of the device, but from what I could understand, they had some very
>> interesting ideas for how such a device should work for (or with) the
>> user. Perhaps some of those ideas also shine through in the actual
>> implementation, for us to be inspired by :-)
>>
> as far i understood main thing it has it's like a cool alt+tab effect, so it
> would be needed like desktop effects on the device...
> or if all aplications in the devices are just plasmoids it could be done just
> by a zoom out effect..
> so there's a question: make an interface that conceive just plasmoids as its
> applications or support also regular good pld windows? think the latter woud b
> better even if plasmoids should be preferred, more addapt to the small frm
> factor..
>
> Cheers,
> Marco Martin

Hi Marco,

I just quickly wrote that email, remembering only vaguely that I
thought some things in the presentation might have seemed to be
interesting. Bad manners. But now I watched it again and took real
notes. (http://i.gizmodo.com/5126752/palm-pre-full-video-tours)

The occasions that made me hop on my chair in chronological order :-)

- part of the ui melds away
The status bar, showing signal strength or a clock, is colored to make
it look as if it were part of the hardware. I like the idea of
interfaces, that are not "in your face". KDE has traditionally been
extremely bad at that, and although it seems the days of the beveled
bevels in KDE are over, "interfaces, that meld away" are still a great
design principle that we could adopt further. The reason is, it
allows:

- you (to) focus on your content
He just mentioned that without showing any particular feature of the
interface. Still a great design principle. Most interfaces are so
"selfish" and demand lots of attention, so in the end users are more
toying with the interface than working with their content.

- you don't loose context
He probably only mentioned that to showcase that the Pre allows
background applications, which the iPhone does not. But thinking about
a user's workflow in situations when more than one task demands his
attention is surely worthwhile and something, that we need to do as
well.

- organized as activities
haha, now who copies from whom? :-)

- all changes are saved automatically
Ingenious. But actually a shame that this needs to be mentioned as a
feature. This should really be default. Everywhere.

- switch between types of communication
It seems that whenever you see a person as sender or recipient in one
of your conversations you get a little combobox allowing you to choose
different communications channels on the fly. Switch from texting to
email or from email to IM. This is fantastic because it shows a
understanding of what the user is actually trying to do. Users want to
communicate, they want to stay in touch with each other; the fact that
they are using email or IM is (mostly) just an implementation detail.

That's basically what struck me as clever thinking about the topic of
mobile user experience on the part of Palm. Of course it remains to be
seen, how well they could implement their clever thoughts.

Regarding your question about applications versus plasmoids, I'll
think about it some more. When I have something clever to say
(probably even earlier :-), I'll come back to you.

michael