Plasma on MID, take 2

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Saturday 28 March 2009, Artur Souza (MoRpHeUz) wrote:
> Hi,
>
> 2009/3/28 Emmanuel Lepage-Vallée <elv1313 at gmail.com>:
> > The user just ended a meeting in a foreign city. He take his nokia n810
> > out of his pocket. The device is in sleep mode. He open it. Now, he
> > -want- to know the weather. He access it very easily and see that there
> > is a snow storm coming. He now device to check for a near hotel to stay
> > for the night. He found one in no time and now -decide- to check for a
> > near restoration to eat before going to the hotel. All these thing are
> > done in about 2 minute while he is standing in front of the meeting
> > building.
>
> The main problem I see with the "tab bar" approach is that for devices
> as small as n8x0 you don't have enough screen space to put that much
> of information there. That was the main UI error with Maemo until
> Diablo release.

regardless of the UI chosen (and i think on small devices an always-fullscreen 
style is best, while the tabbar can work rather nicely on larger screens), a 
nice idea that could turn into a small but interesting innovation is setting 
up groups of items that "work together".

right now on all the smaller devices i've used (smart phones, tablets and 
netbooks included) all the apps are displayed in categories at best and 
sometimes not even that. often on smaller devices things are just arranged in 
grids you pick from and might be able to rearrange according to your personal 
preference.

so you can see all "games" together, for instance, or put your favourite apps 
at the top of the grid listing. but that doesn't really match reality, does 
it? in the case of going out for a night on the town with friends vs the case 
of going to a business meeting, the apps i'll want available to me are likely 
rather different.

i can think of a few possible lines of research that could be interesting:

* allowing the user to form topical groups of their own and access these 
quickly; this is the concept of Activities on the desktop, really, though it 
would look and behave slightly different on small devices: instead of showing 
the actual widgets it would probably show launchers. otherwise, same concept.

* keeping track of what apps are run when; perhaps they consult the restaurant 
application most often around lunch and dinner times? :)

* keeping track of which apps they use at the same time or after another one

the latter two would mean collecting bits of data and coming up with results 
based on them. all of the concepts above make the account/device conform over 
time to the user.

they may even be useful/interesting on the desktop as well.

-- 
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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