About KDE/plasma on small devices

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On November 21, 2009, Andreas Marschke wrote:
> I've been tinkering about KDE on smaller devices such s the n900 Aaron
>  luckily informed me about the playground project that is in place and will
>  probably be out on 4.4 (the plasma keyboard as far as I'm aware).

well, pieces will be in 4.4, such as the keyboard. the plasma-mobile shell 
doesn't have a target date yet, but is at least started.
 
> In my humble opinion the best suited for the job is the netbook
>  shell.

it's close, but there will be things in it that just don't fit very well. 
fortunately, plasma encourages a highly modular design and so parts that do 
make sense can be shared between plasma-netbook and plasma-mobile without much 
effort at all.

>  Things that are used on the mobile phone could be developed as a
>  plsmoid which would then just be added to the newspaper containment. This

yes; it could also be something more custom-fitted to a small screen, 
particularly when it comes to application transitions. see, for instance, what 
the palm pre or even the iphone does in this area.

i really think, given the size of the device, that an emphasis on full screen 
apps and switching easily between them with nice visual effects would be good.

when it comes to the n900 itself, they use an expose-like effect which would 
mean a different Plasma::View for each widget on the canvas. this is actually 
not uncommon (it's how popup applets work in the icon-and-dialog state, e.g. 
when in a panel in plasma-desktop).

>  would have the issue that you would get quite scared because most of the
>  mobilephone apps would have to be placed there.

why would this be a problem? I'm not sure i'm seeing the issue here :)

> Another ,  more userfriendly, approach could be to add
> containments/activities for sms/phonecalls/videos or what ever somebody
>  would want to use there. These would then added dynamically as a new
>  Activity you would switch them by providing the activities-switch-plasmoid
>  in each activities panel. Unfortunately I am not fully aware about how
>  easy/hard it is to do things like that.

creating Containments (which we call "Activities" in the user interface when 
they are on the desktop layer in plasma-desktop or the top bar in plasma-
netbook) is trivial: Corona::addContainment. then it's just a matter of 
deciding when that should be called.

as for creating containments for each ... it might make sense to just create 
plasmoids for each and treat them more or less like any other widget.

i also wonder how much of the "this is a phone, let's make a phone call" 
interface could be put behind/inside a DataEngine/Service pair.

> So one of the things that would need to be inplace would be information for
> people who are not yet involved in the development.  For now  small wrap up
>  on the mailing list would help to get first pointers upon from where to
>  tackle all these issues.

if you ask questions, we can provide answers :)

-- 
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 Development Frameworks
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/attachments/20091123/bfaf9919/attachment.sig