Plasma-Netbook Mockups

[Artur Souza (MoRpHeUz)]

On Friday 09 April 2010, 20:13 Markus wrote:
> Both are touch-based devices and almost everybody who these days develops
> GUIs for such devices gets more than only inspiration from Apple.

Hmm, well this could be turned into a flame war hehe :) Just to be fair, Nokia 
N770 was in the market since at least 6 years ago and already had touch-based 
interfaces/applications...but well, as I said, let's not get into this topic as 
it has nothing to do with Plasma :) We can drink a beer while discussing this 
during akademy :D

> Compare Apple's early PowerBooks (eg.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Powerbook_duo_2300c.jpg ) to a modern
> netbook: No, not different at all (from a usability standpoint):
> 9" screen for display and keyboard + touchpad for input. If sold today,
> everybody would call them netbooks.

Exactly and that's the problem. Netbooks are not regular notebooks or desktops 
and that's what is most frustrating for users. Vendors put the same software 
that is supposed to run on desktops on that tiny screen and users have a 
horrible experience and then they blame the hardware, and it is not the 
problem. This is the reason most users return their netbooks to stores.

The solution ? They started doing netbooks with bigger screens =/ We want to 
provide a great user experience, and that needs a lot of changes in KDE itself 
and not just Plasma. If the user wants a regular desktop he can already get 
that with KDE and just tweak it enough to fit to it's needs.

Plasma Netbook aims at something that goes a little bit beyond this. I would 
suggest you reading the paper from last Akademy to get a little bit more of our 
research and ideas. Some stuff changed since then, but the main ideas are there 
and besides not being suitable for a 100% of our users, it seems to solve the 
issues of most of our netbook users....and of course it can improve a lot more 
and that's why help is needed.

> I'm not saying that Apple has to be copied at all costs. No. I'm merely
> suggesting that some conventions that were researched over years could be
> adapted. That's all. :-)
> And if you all say "Bah, your ideas suck. IT stone age's over.", then I'm
> fine with it as well. :-) I just reply to almost every mail, because I
> simply don't want to be misunderstood. :-)

Let's just avoid this Apple/Microsoft comparison at all. We are not them and we 
have our own ideas and principles :). Sometimes we are just so used to a work 
flow or user interface that we can't see beyond it. It happened a lot with 
KDE3's users that just can't switch to KDE4. From my POV it seems that your 
ideas are a little bit biased by the fact that you used (and liked - and there 
is no problem at all with it) for a long time Mac OS(X) and maybe that's why we 
can't agree on some parts: I really don't buy the "Apple is the UX master guru" 
specially because I see even apple fans just using other hw/sw when they want 
to get stuff done :P (besides designers that have all the tools developed for 
Mac, then it's not a fair competition ;P)

Cheers!


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Artur Duque de Souza
openBossa
INdT - Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia
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Blog: http://blog.morpheuz.cc
PGP: 0xDBEEAAC3 @ wwwkeys.pgp.net
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