KDE framework 5 - a humble idea

[Marco Martin]

On Wednesday 18 September 2013, Michele Andrea Kipiel wrote:
> hello everybody,
> 

hi, thanks for the comments

> 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.

keep in mind that video was pretty much a tech preview, doesn't represent that 
much how the ui will be (even tough right now the plan is to have a release of 
plasma2 with an ui/feature set similar to plasma1)

> 
> 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)?

As Mark already said, this is mostly implementing meaningful actions for drag 
and drop on every plasmoid where it makes sense, and this is an orthogonal 
problem to actually "communicating with each other"

now would be needed to be defined what "communicating with each other" means.. 
does a folderview plasmoid need to know a picture frame is here too? if yes, 
what it needs to say to it? is it needed an api?

right now plasmoids by themselves are designed to be as sandboxed as possible, 
in part for security in part for lack of use case for doing otherwise.

even tough they can communicate with the environment and with other 
applications with means of nepomuk,akonadi as common "data stores" and share-
like-connect as in a plasmoid that knows what file or url the currently active 
application is working on

Cheers,
Marco Martin