KDE framework 5 - a humble idea
Michele Kipiel
michele.kipiel at gmail.com
Wed Sep 18 20:01:59 UTC 2013
Il giorno mer, 18/09/2013 alle 18.10 +0200, Mark ha scritto:
> -- 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
>
>
>
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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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>
>
>
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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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What exaclty is a data engine? :)
i'm not a coder, sorry!
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