Welcome to 4.3.

[Chani]

> 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.

whoa, dejavu ;) I remember aaron talking about how the n810 either does that 
or should do that, quite a while ago. probably at akademy. :)

> 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:

yep.

>
> - 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.

indeed. for a while we had some resistance to the idea that plasma's theme 
controls all the widgets' backgrounds, and the widgets don't do it themselves. 
everyone wants their plasmoid to be special ;)

>
> - 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.

can you expand on that? I'm not sure how it would apply to plasma. hmm, 
acttually we don't have a way for plasmoids to demand attention yet.
not being able to run more than one app at once does sound painful :/

>
> - 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.

haha, dejavu again; see aaron's ideas for the plasma design studio.
and of course plasma itself saves its configuration fairly aggressively (while 
also trying to reduce the number of disk writes)

>
> - 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.

yes. that's important, and although it's more the realm of kdepim and kontact, 
we do have some kind of presence plasmoid in playground. I haven't looked at 
it myself yet, as I usually use my n810 for chatting now. it kinda-sorta offers 
this feature, but in practice I only use the IM part - their email software is 
a bit limited for me ;)

-- 
This message brought to you by eevil bananas and the number 3.
www.chani3.com
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