KDE framework 5 - a humble idea

Wed Sep 18 16:10:17 UTC 2013

-- bottom post please --
On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 4:59 PM, Michele Andrea Kipiel <
michele.kipiel at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Plasma-devel mailing list
>>> 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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Plasma-devel mailing list
>> Plasma-devel at kde.org
>> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
>>
>>
>
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>
Err, i actually don't think it would fit my need very much..
Lets take my developer example here.

How would you make that more interactive?

If you follow your example with a stock tracker then it kinda feels like
logging functionality.. Not something special as an plasmoid that
communicates with - lets say - kexi or some other excel application. And
with the twitter profile, that can be done with data engines.

In fact, i think all the stuff you want can be either implemented using
data engines or (my preference) as a separate QML component.
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