KDE framework 5 - a humble idea

Wed Sep 18 14:59:18 UTC 2013

Hello

thanks for the quick reply :)

the interaction you describe as "truly communicating plasmoids" is pretty
much what i imagined when i referred to yahoo pipes. i imagined  some
scenarios for that interactio too: think of a "picture frame" plasmoid
which displays a new picture every time a twitter profile (national
geographic, for example) posts a picture. that would require a background
connection between the two. Another scenario i imagined is a stock based
one: imagine you have a "stock ticker" plasmoid on your desk, wich is
connected to a "spreadsheet" plasmoid which registers all the variation of
a certain stock and then saves them in a file.

The core idea of my proposal is to enable a new interaction layer wich is
accessible straight from the desktop, without the need to even launch a
single application after boot&login. The desktop itself would become an
active environmnt, instead of an empty space.

Would such a desktop fit your workflow?

2013/9/18 Mark <markg85 at gmail.com>

> 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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>> Plasma-devel at kde.org
>> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
>>
>>
> 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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> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
>
>
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