Workspace Next Sprint Organization

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday, May 14, 2012 16:52:40 Björn Balazs wrote:
> there have been some doubts about technical issues that could come along
> with creating the "vision"...

personally, i'd really appreciate it if the current vision was kept. going to 
the moon and creating a single-finger-naviable-massive-storage music device are 
both new product statements. plasma desktop does not need a new product 
statement, nor do our users particularly want one.

for those who aren't aware of the current vision[1], it's pretty simple:

today people have huge numbers of files, devices, people they know, network 
services they use; and few use their computer (laptop / desktop) for just one 
particular task (work, entertainment, personal communication, school..). 
plasma desktop should make it easy to use one computer for multiple tasks, 
focusing on providing scalable interfaces to present information and access to 
data in ways people will find useful for today's contexts. this should all be 
presented using direct manipulation interfaces that have an organic look and 
feel.


this is where activities and SLC come from. neither are fully realized on the 
desktop.

this is where plasmoids came from: present information, and not just the 
contents of one folder, to the user.

this is where the emphasis on animated visual transitions and not relying on 
right clicks comes from.

that vision is still not complete. there is still much to do, and it is still 
a valid and powerful set of goals. i don't feel that the desktop needs a 
sweeping new set of ideas.

what is needed is for those who are gong to be working on it to understand why 
they are working on it and what will drive their particular contributions to 
it. there is evidently a desire to do more than only contribute to improving 
what is already there in the shape everything already is in, and that's 
good[2] 

for such an effort to "push forward" to actually pay off, those doing the work 
need to know what it is those efforts should be, thematically. otherwise we'll 
just have a bunch of small improvements with no coherent purpose to them and, 
while it could very well be a real improvement, it would not be highly 
impactful for our users (though still appreciated).

such thematic statements may involve quality ("no known crashes in core code", 
"all plasmoids we ship following these human interface principles 
consistently...") or performance or specific workflow components, etc.


[1] note that nothing there is said of component-centric design or the core 
concept of device spectrum thinking; those are things plasma desktop must not 
break with, but they are concepts that belong the underlying plasma 
architecture rather than plasma desktop itself.

[2] though i do hesitate out of concern that this might also mean that there 
is too little discipline and appreciation of maintenance; something that has 
plagued so many contributions to plasma desktop, leaving more and more 
maintenance on the shoulders of those of us who understand this responsibility

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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