Looking around and thinking ahead

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday, December 12, 2013 02:26:42 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> Today, I'm running Plasma 2 almost exclusively on my laptop. The most

you wonderful, crazy man. :)

> In plasma-shell, we have some construction sites as well. Kickoff still
> feels quite unfinished (some would say broken ;)), configuration of

do we even want to keep kickoff? we need the menu based launcher for legacy 
support, but i really really wonder if the kickoff UX is at all relevant 
anymore. that’s a different thread, though.

> plasma-framework needs some work on APIs, too. With large version number
> change, we can reduce the delta between libplasma and our declarative
> imports. There are some candidates which currently use quite some glue code
> for our declarative bindings. Can cook this down and maybe move some
> implementations into libplasma, or adding necessary Q_PROPERTYs to our API?

sounds like a perfect candidate for a class-by-class examination of what is in 
the declarative imports.

> The scriptengine has quite a large bunch of code as well. Does it make
> sense to move the plasmoid. object (offered to our Plasma/Applets) into
> libplasma, it's pretty much core of our current API, but otoh is currently
> fixed to QML.

no QML (or other rendering system) in libplasma.

> graphics stack was the base work we had to lay. The UI side is where we can
> really make a difference, we've built quite an awesome base, but we need to
> turn this into real, added value for our users.

yep.

> We're not very well equipped in the artwork department. Perhaps we can try
> to find artists more actively. I think we have some very exciting work to
> be done, with a large audience. There *must* be good designers around who
> want to help us making Plasma beautiful.

i have worked with 2 groups now .. and despite regular and supportive feedback 
and assistance from my side, both failed to produce completed results.

this may be “heresy” but perhaps we should entertain a freemium model whereby 
there is some $ on the table for the artist. i’m rather out of ideas how to 
motivate such people, while at the same time some of the community art groups 
are already moving in that direction.

> Part of this communication is that we should settle the name question. We
> had a good discussion about that some time ago, but it died out before
> reaching a conclusion. Let's put the options back on the table, and come to
> a decision there. (Relevant thread is "naming the next major release" on
> 19th August on plasma-devel.)

i’m all for `Plasma 2` with the shells named after the form factor they 
target. Plasma Desktop, Plasma Netbook (renamed to?), Plasma Tablet, etc.

the Plasma Active name is still relevant for the applications involved .. but 
perhaps we should retire it in general. this means thinking about how we 
name/refer to our applications that target different form factors. this is not 
limited to Plasma Active. we have Kontact Touch, Marble To Go (iirc?), 
Calligra Active ... chaos :) perhaps we could re-purpose Active for those. 
regardless, i think that particular discussion is out of scope for Plasma and 
ought to be had with the general KDE application dev community

> Q3 and 4, I imagine, could shift the focus from the bare basics to a more
> complete product. Multi-device usecases realized by different shells,
> meaning porting and integrating the Plasma Active UI, Plasma Mediacenter,

how is shell switching being tested currently?

the ‘netbook’ interface will also need porting to a proper shell package and 
probably could use a rename.

this should all hopefully go rather quickly given that we can drop a number of 
hacks and workarounds with the move to pure QML.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo