KDE framework 5 - a humble idea

[Mark]

On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 11:26 AM, Michele Andrea Kipiel <
michele.kipiel at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>
Hi,

First of all, i'm not a plasma developer so i can't really comment on your
ideas from a plasma desktop point of view. I can on a technical point of
view.

What you describe as plasmoids talking to each other with the examples you
provide isn't really talking to each other at all. It is just properly
implementing drag/drop for all plasmoids. So for example, if you want to
"drag" an image from your file browser to the "gimp" plasmoid then the
"gimp" plasmoid would have to support dropping that specific image format.
Furthermore if you want to manipulate that image on the gimp plasmoid and
drag the results to facebook then it would have to support drag
functionality as well. The facebook plasmoid would then have to accept a
drop with that image type and handle it. That is not easy stuff to
implement properly. In fact, in pure QML (which the new plasmoids for
plasma 2 are) that only becomes possible in Qt 5.2. Now i think KDE had
some custom drag/drop components that implemented the same support.

Then for plasmoids _really_ talking to each other. If that where to be
implemented (which i doubt) then i guess it should work somewhat like this.
Reusing your example here. Imagine you have a facebook plasmoid and you're
using it. If you then move to a "file manager plasmoid" it should know that
you came from the facebook plasmoid. If you then select and drag an image
it could automatically pop up a "gimp" plasmoid to throw some fancy filters
over your image. The gimp plasmoid (which then knows you came here from the
file browser from facebook) should offer an option: "Publish to facebook"
or something alike. That would be really plasmoids communicating with each
other and would frankly be quite scarry :)

Lastly how i use the plasmoids. I'm a developer so i have an interest in
more then one console window. So i simply put a bunch of consoles on my
desktop along with a CPU monitor. That works quite well, but only works if
you have the screen room for it. It doesn't work on one screen since you
just don't have the room to see the plasmoids and other windows. I have two
screens so that's why it works for me that way.

Cheers,
Mark
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