Plasma on MID, take 2

[Marco Martin]

On Tuesday 24 March 2009, Michael Rudolph wrote:
> 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
yes, i would love too to exit from the old application centric paradigm, i see 
it possible for some kind of apps and not much for others
the example you gave it's with okular and that's right, okular is an app that 
can easily become transparent, in the sense that is really useless to put it 
in a menu, okular is opened when you click on a pdf, whatever the 
representation of the pdf file is (attachment web link, filemanager, whatever)

other things are really chained by their nature to be an "application" 
presented as is, like games or things like a media player or a web browser, 
that are pretty central on a mid are really tied to the concept of application
on a small device it means mostly "switch my device to media player mode" or 
things like that
and then yeah, if all those "activities" are implemented as applications or as 
well.. activities is something that has to be totally hidden from the user

i think an initial icon grid that mostly says chose how you want to use your 
device, multimedia? communications? whatever
it will of course not have to contain all the cruft menus have in a standard 
linux distributions

> 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
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