KDE framework 5 - a humble idea

[Michele Andrea Kipiel]

hello everybody,

the following message is part of an email i sent a few days ago to Marco
Martin, who then asked me to share my thoughts on this mailng list.

***
my name is michele kipiel and i am a ux designer. I currently work for the
Kering luxury group, where i design and user test the checkout processes
and the overall UX of the luxury sites.

i recently came across a video showing the new KDE framework 5 improvements
(the one posted by phoronics, in case you were wondering).

watching that video reminded me of what immediately struck me when i first
tried KDE 4: the apparent lack of a true purpose for the plasmoids. as a ux
designer i constantly strive towards simplification and rationalization of
the user experience, and the first thing i noticed about the plasmoids was
that they didn't improve my experience in any relevant way, while taking up
lots of space on my small 13" laptop screen.

i asked myself a simple question: what do i need on my desktop? what i came
to realize is that i could really use a desktop which acts as a connection
point between the hundreds of apps that live on my hard drive.

current plasmoids act as discrete information bubbles (weather, rss, im,
social feeds etc..) and threy don't communicate with each other, which in
my opinion hampers their usefulness. in other words: what would happen if
KDE added a common backend to connect all the plasmoids (i'm thinking of
something similar to what elementary OS is doing with contractor)?

imagine this scenario: i have a file manager plasmoid open on my desktop,
along with other ones. i want to share one of my pictures to facebook. i
drag and drop the picture from the file manager plasmoid onto the "facebook
feed" plasmoid, which in turn activates the sharing feature, allowing me to
add a caption, tag my friends and eventually share the picture.

now imagine i want to turn the picture in b/w before sharing it: i just
drag and drop the picture onto the "gimp" plasmoid, which shows me a
preview of the picture and lets me select an action form a pool of simple,
predefined functions. once my picture is rendered, i just have to drag it
from the "gimp" plasmoid onto the "facebook" one to share it.

in these scenarios each plasmoid acts as a graphic frontend that exposes
some functions of the related programs, which don't even need to be
launched. it could be even possible to create predefined sequences
connecting different plasmoids (think of yahoo pipes, for instance).

i don't know whether this is possible or not, but i believe it could be a
massive leap forward for the KDE desktop paradigm.
***

thank you in advance for every comment, positive or negative.

regards,
MK
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