Guest post by KDE reaches out to another device form factor. Plasma’s plugin-based design is at work again, after launching KDE special netbook interface. This time around, the KDE team presents its Plasma Tablet interface.
Despite what some people claim, KDE Plasma’s development is a huge success. From day one Plasma was intended to be extremely flexible. The
first manifestation of the Plasma technology was the traditional-looking Plasma Desktop.
Plasma Desktop
Despite its – at first glance – traditional interface, it featured some unique design decisions, like the ability to reserve only a certain area for icons. The next step for KDE was to develop an interface specifically targeted towards netbooks.
Plasma Netbook’s “Search and Launch” page
Although it behaves rather differently, most code is shared with Plasma Desktop – improvements in the foundation technology are shared with all Plasma implementations.
Plasma Netbook’s design is centered around the concept of pages. By default there are two pages: a Newspaper page that displays current news that is fetched from RSS sources, the weather forecast, etc., and a “Search and Launch” page for finding and opening applications and documents.
While Plasma Netbook reached production quality with KDE SC 4.4, a third shell entered into development. Plasma Mobile is geared towards smartphones and similar devices. With it came improvements in finger friendliness to the whole Plasma framework.
Early prototype of Plasma Mobile (click for video in .ogv)
Now KDE’s Plasma developers merged concepts of Plasma Mobile with the Plasma Netbook’s Newspaper concept and the result is Plasma Tablet. While it’s still experimental (just like Plasma Mobile is), it shows an
additional use case for the technology without the requirement to recode everything from scratch.
Plasma Tablet on a device that uses VESA drivers and therefor doesn’t run at full performance.
According to an e-mail on the KDE Plasma mailing list an unnamed manufacturer already plans to use a Plasma-based shell on upcoming tablets. Along with the port of KWin to OpenGL ES, the future for KDE technologies on mobile platforms certainly looks bright.
The weakness of most UIs on tablets is text input – You need a sane virtual keyboard to be not very much annoying, taking right place, always close by but still somewhere out of Your siht until needed. This is well done in Android and iOS. Here seems to be non-existent.
Actully too far from usable state yet…
Nobody is claiming that the Tablet interface is currently usable. In fact, Marco Martin clearly wrote that it is still experimental.
on screen keyboard:
yes, we are working on it (some time ago i shown an early stage of it on the blog).
this will also depend on what platform it will run.
Somewhere it could use an already present system-wide one, or have to use whatever system wide standard way to make it appear when and only when is necessary…
but anyways yes, all is at early stages of development, and work is going quite fast.
this will also depend on what platform it will run.
Somewhere it could use an already present system-wide one, or have to use whatever system wide standard way to make it appear when and only when is necessary…
I find the way Opera Mobile does this on my Nokia N900 to be extremely good and would absolutely love to have it in more apps than just one: it shows the virtual keyboard only when you tap on a field that accepts input, zooms in on what you are typing, and hides the keyboard when you tap on “Ready”, outside the input area, or you open the hardware keyboard. It also has enough spacing between the virtual keys and numbers aren’t accessible by default; you tap on a key with ‘123’ written on it to switch to special characters and numbers. This saves space and makes the keyboard visibly less cluttered.
Sounds pretty much the same as on iOS. Except without the hardware keyboard of course.
That sounds a lot like Android’s keyboard, which wasn’t it because text prediction (and specially the autoreplacement) gets in my way more often than not, I would be quite satisfied with.
That layout does indeed work fine, even on portrait.
Plasma Tablet Edition: Even if you have a dinosaur claw for a hand, you can still use it!
Edited 2010-08-15 20:00 UTC
I hate to say it, but I was thinking the same thing. I couldn’t even tell where he was trying to push on the screen.
So an experiment has quirks. Big deal.
The focus of the article was to show code reuse between GUIs for different form factors which should be an interesting topic for a technology website like OSNews.
good programmer demo.
Hopefully they can get the speed to where it’s usable (as shown would drive me nuts after about 2 minute).
It looks like they aren’t making the same mistake as Microsoft, in trying to graft a touch screen interface onto their existing apps. That typically ends up as a badly done skin, and then you drop right into the Win32 API with its mouse-specific interface.
Usability is a bit of a concern, only because open source doesn’t have the greatest track record for making interfaces that aren’t terrifying to the general public (Microsoft does only slightly better). Android is the best at that in the open source world.
“Plasma Tablet on a device that uses VESA drivers and therefor doesn’t run at full performance,” says the video caption.
IMHO usability-wise pretty much everything is better than the average Microsoft GUI (exceptions like Win Phone 7 exist obviously).
Big FOSS projects like KDE and GNOME have usability teams these days and since it’s easier to apply a good GUI on top of new applications (or in this case a completely new GUI on top of an existing core) than to rearrange existing GUIs, I not worried about usability.
True, however, look at Qt QUICK. It allows you to have more than one interface style for a single app.
yep, that’s what is being used in Plasma mobile, Plasma tablet and Kontact mobile
I’m sure the nerds in the world that actually want a tablet with Linux on will be verx pleased.
Everyone else will stick with iTablet
Many people in this world run an Android phone without even knowing about the Linux name.
If a linux tablet has reasonably good software and hardware, is backed by big companies, and is relatively cheap, it will sell. In fact, some of those criterions may even compensate others : the iPhone was far from being cheap if you consider what it does and its software quality (okay but not very exciting), but it was massively backed by the Apple behemoth and most mobile phone companies here in France, and we saw lots of sales…
Edited 2010-08-16 13:23 UTC
I don’t know what an iTablet is. A cheap knock off of the iPad from China I assume. Though I have no idea why a cheap knock off should prevail.
Free Software is actually dominating the current tablet landscape. iPad’s iOS is a BSD Unix with an proprietary high level layer. Lower level layers like LLVM, WebKit, Bonjour, etc. are all FOSS with contributions by Apple to the appropriate upstream projects. In fact it’s likely that FreeBSD 9 will move to the LLVM-based compiler infrastructure Apple is developing for iOS applications (clang).
On the Linux side the future looks promising as well: Android is already in use on Archos tablets with more on the horizon with Android 3.0.
MeeGo has also gathered some followers from the industry.
And webOS will power HP’s upcoming Palmpad.
KDE’s Plasma is only one player in the diverse FOSS landscape that runs on almost all tablets.
Yeah I meant iPad.
I mean this kde plasma tablet thing looks good in the screenshots here, but it’s just playing catchup with iPad for consumers. Sure it may get used elsewhere, but to be honest, when processing photos in a shop to obtain instant photos I don’t care if linux is powering the photo developer or not.
Edited 2010-08-16 13:40 UTC
iOS is not a BSD Unix with a proprietary high level layer. It’s a mach kernel with a BSD subsystem, all that subsystem does is provide text userland tools and services. It is BSD. It could be ripped out and replaced with the GNU userland. The graphical environment is also a subsystem.
Um, the kernel of Mac OS X and iOS is called XNU. XNU combines code from Mach with code from 4.3BSD. Mach itself is also derived from a BSD kernel (even though much code was replaced in the meantime, but FreeBSD is not different in this respect), making XNU a direct descendant of the original BSD.
Mach is a microkernel, The BSDs kernel is a monolithic kernel. Two different beasts.
XNU just takes mach and bolts a BSD subsystem on top of it. The BSD portion is NOT part of the kernel. I know it’s Wikipaedia, but:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_%28kernel%29
Edited 2010-08-17 10:50 UTC
So? Original Mach is still derived from a BSD kernel.
Yes, over time it changed significantly. Yes, Mach is a microkernel, the original BSD is not.
You know what? XNU isn’t a microkernel either.
I suggest that you look at the actual source code files of XNU instead of posting stuff you know only partially about.
Why in hell would I look at the source code? I’m not a C, C++ or Objective C developer, so it wouldn’t mean much to me. That’s like telling me to go read the Old Testament in ancient Hebrew.
Oh, and posting stuff you know only partially about is what the internet is all about, are you new or something?
I’m not a programmer either but I can at least look at the headers of source files and see plenty of original BSD copyright notices there.
You used to be able to find BSD code in Windows tcpip stack too, that doesn’t mean that Windows is based on BSD (though I kinda wish it was).
Regardless, I concede your point about BSD being part of the OSX kernel. On the other hand, calm down, life’s too short
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KDE folks obviously hate the concept of simplicity and elegant interfaces…
Anyway, at least if this succeeds, uber geek nerds will have a product with a messy interface to play with
edit: I’m not a KDE hater, I’m just very displeased with the path of complex an unusable software they choose to follow. I was a strong defender of KDE4 ideas on beginning, and even helped a bit with some usability issues on KDevelop, but I just abandoned it when I perceived that many people on it’s community hates simplicity, and can’t use software that has less then 5000 buttons on screen and UI controls for everything you can imagine……
Edited 2010-08-16 14:53 UTC
That is less or more the point of KDE, you can disable those buttons and move things around, but they exist, and it is on purpose.
I don’t know about KDevelop in particular but the average KDE Application does not have “5000 buttons on screen” by default as Puelocesar claims.
It is possible to give any single action that has a menu entry a button in the toolbar via the “Configure toolbar” window but that is purely optional and in no way default and never ever has been default.
we are way better in this regard compared to the past and yes, we can get better, still.
In Plasma we never accepted complex interfaces, neither we accept things like micro-options to change some not relevant detail.
in those videos, the wigets shon are pure content, with nearly zero chrome. They are mostly lists of content, being microblog entries, news from rss, contacts from opendesktop, weater info…
you won’t see more than one-two buttons for each of those widgets, just when the widget lets “post entries” or things like that.
Sweet, kind of surprised they had that odd looking tablet instead of just running it on the Nokia N900.
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/10/27/qgraphicsview-is-a-humme…
They were working on it since Oct 2009, which means it was being worked on BEFORE the N900 was even released.
Looking forward to this, even though I don’t even really like KDE. A lot of the Plasma stuff is really cool though.
N900 is a smartphone, Plasma already have a smartphone UI. This is the tablet UI, there is also the NetBook UI et Desktop UI (normal mode).
Technically the N900 is in the class of “Internet Tablets” as the other N700 and N800 series were.
It really is more of an internet tablet that makes calls, than a smart phone. I always tell people, it’s a mini computer, that has some phone features. And I believe that’s a pretty accurate description.
yes, that’s what makes the device more interesting.
However its screen physical size puts it in another category compared to bigger tablet, from an user workflow standpoint, that’s why we are thinking about two different user interfaces