Plasma on MID, take 2

[Michael Rudolph]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 16:46, Marco Martin <notmart at gmail.com> wrote:
> given that someone doesn't find some revolutionary way to launch aplications
> (or call them tasks or activities or whatever) better than an icon grid...
>
> Cheers,
> Marco Martin

Hi Marco,

hihi, I guess that was what I was aiming for. :-)

I never understood why plasma-mid wants to cater to, well, MIDs, as
well as netbooks. The later seem to me to be just a very clever
rendition of our regular computers along with a certain set of
limitations (and will be operated as such). More like cheap regular
notebooks are somehow limited compared to expensive regular notebooks,
but both are operated the same way. MIDs seem to be different beasts
altogether.

What I had in mind was to in fact get rid of applications completely
(as user interface primitives, that is). I imagined perhaps a temporal
user interface or a spacial user interface or a social user interface.

A spacial UI could be (I know it souds scary :-) Marble with a clever
selection of information layers. We haven't talked about use cases
enough, so I'm not sure I even make sense to most of you. But that can
hopefully be remedied.

The social UI could be just a large canvas with heads of my contacts
on it; pictures of their heads, that is. When I tap them, I can start
communicating with them, or see recent conversations, files we shared,
events we went to together. Say someone shared a PDF document with me,
when I tap it, it will surely be opened in Okular, but no one needs to
know about that. Applications will be important as always, just not as
user interface primitives.

If that sounds like it could indeed be better than an icon grid, we
should pursue this further, perhaps by agreeing on some use cases
first that are important to us. And also keep coordinating with our
soc students.

What do you think? Or do you need shiny mockups first? :-)

michael