On Monday 28 June 2010 14:06:34 Artur Souza (MoRpHeUz) wrote:
On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 5:57 PM, Cornelius Schumacher
schumac...@kde.org wrote:
While collecting information about the developer sprints, which happended
in the last twelve months, I noticed that the Tokamak 4 landing page at
http://community.kde.org/KDE_e.V./Sprints/Tokamak4 still is incomplete.
There is a more dot stories forthcoming notice and I don't see a link
to the nice videos you recorded at the meeting. Could someone please
update the page?
AFAIK the videos were with Billie or Sebas but not sure. And
definitely we need more dot stories. Maybe by the same time we launch
the videos?
There's a nearly finished one about the mobile work on my disk, I've attached
it. If we still want to publish it, we should make it more general and update
some sections. I think it's still a valuable article and interesting subject.
Aaron was planning to write an article about the work on activities, but I
haven't heard anything back about this. The videos, I've put into the hands of
a guy on kde-promo who offered editing them. Haven't heard back from him after
repeated pings. :/ I do have the original material though, but as I'm lacking
experience and skills to edit them, it'd cost me huge amounts of time. Not
sure when I can actually spare this time (certainly not within the next three
weeks).
--
sebas
http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org | GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9
The Tokamak 4 Files: Plasma on Mobile Devices
In front of you you have the second installment of the Tokamak 4 Files, a series of articles that put various aspect of KDE SC which have been worked on during the Tokamak 4 sprint in February earlier this year. During Tokamak 4, which was hosted by the openSUSE folks in the heart of Nuremberg in Germany, a group of 26 hackers and artists gathered for about a week to work on various aspects of and beyond Plasma, KDE's desktop and netbook shell.
[TODO:groupphoto from wiki page w/ names]
One of the focus points of the fourth edition of Tokamak was running Plasma on Mobile devices and work on the KDE Development Platform's suitability for mobile development. While Plasma Netbook has come to maturity in its first release along with teh KDE Software Compilation 4.4 earlier in February this year, the Plasma team is also looking beyond this formfactor. In a breakout team which worked on platform and UI topics for the whole week, two rather impressive results have been reached, a prototype of Plasma mobile, a Plasma environment for smartphones, and an RFC (Request for Comment) to shrink the footprint of the KDE platform in order to make it a more viable option for devices with limited hardware resources, especially in the mobile and embedded space.
Plasma Mobile
The new Plasma Mobile shell, which has been conceived by QGraphicsView-hacker Alexis Menard not long ago has seen some serious work put into it. The first session that was held discussed various UI concepts for devices like the Nokia N900 and the Intel JAX10. The developers had some sample devices of both at hand, so proposals could easily be related to the actual device Plasma Mobile might run on. A first idea was to employ concepts of a ZUI [TODO:ZUI link], though the team wasn't really happy from a visualization point of view with those concepts. The next idea that was further explored included an "Activity" concept, more closely oriented at how the current Moblin interface looks like. This UI has as its major concepts topical modes. The start screen can be unlocked by dragging a bar with 4 rather large buttons onto the screen, combining unlocking of the device and bringing the primary UI into the picture. Those Zones can hold both, Plasma widgets for a specific topic such as PIM or Social Networking, and also applications that are used there. Each zone can be flipped to its backside to open a (currently unused) scratchpad area which can be used to hold contextual information or application launchers for the specific activity. As the team decided to go forward with this idea, the participating Oxygen designers headed by Nuno Pinheiro created mockups that were turned into moving screens subsequently.
[TODO: mockup Plasma mobile]
Prototype of Plasma Mobile on Maemo and Moblin
http://www.notmart.org/index.php/Software/A_mobile_Tokamak
http://blog.morpheuz.cc/28/02/2010/the-mobile-concept/
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2010/02/28/tokamak-4-the-kde-plasma-meeting/
Plasma Mobile is based on Qt Quick (also known as Qt Declarative, or QML) as prototyping environment. (Although it is not unlikely that the final version of Plasma Mobile will be based on the same technology.) Qt Quick has been closely integrated with Plasma making it a first-class citizen in the Plasma space, meaning that Plasma components can easily be integrated into QML-based applets and applications, but also that QML can be used to write Plasma Widgets and containments in. In order to fully
