"I never see my desktop because it's always covered with windows. What use is plasma to me?"
"Will plasma have a MacOS Dashboard style mode where the widgets pop on top?"
i hear these two questions about plasma often enough that i'm dedicating a blog entry to answering it. first, here's my obviously biased opinion of mac os dashboard: pretty but flawed.
there are some truly nicely designed widgets for it, but here's why i think mac os dashboard falls short:
reason 0: it's heavy. i was amazed at how much ram that thing took. and for just a screen cover layer?
reason 1: it's only available as an over-the-top-of-your-windows thing leaving you, the user, in the "modal muddle". forcing people to choose between modes of operation with no flexibility is stupid.
reason 2: they beat me to implementing the full screen widget display. this is my "sour grapes" reason ;)
in my earliest design presentations on plasma, i had a slide that showed the concept of allowing the desktop to be "z ordered" above other windows. i even had a crappy little graphic showing the concept because it was otherwise hard to get across to people at first because there wasn't anything i could point to and go "see, that's what i want to do". ("hm? desktop above windows? but.. it's the desktop, right?") that is, until dashboard arrive in the spring of 2005 with tiger. damn them! ;) while i was waiting for kde4 devel to start with all my plans tucked neatly away in my pockets, they were developing something that had a number of similar features. ah, the 100th monkey syndrome strikes again!
what they did get right was allowing people to do stuff in little portable bundles of javascript and html. plasma has support for them (well, it does on zack's laptop anyways ;) and that's only because they used js+html. unfortunately, some also have some macos binary bundles in them and those aren't very portable. oh well. they also got the "make a place for people to add their own widgets for others to grab" thing right with their widget website.
but they didn't go far enough, imho. it's too much of a heavy-handed add-on-esque thing. it also doesn't really change much about how you use your computer; but then to be fair neither have any of the other gadget factories, really.
in any case, to answer the original questions:
yes, you will be able to flip your desktop contents to the front of your windows if you have a composition manager around. the latter is because without it i can't make the background translucent, which i think is a basic requirement for this feature (so people don't freak out that they've lost their windows). maybe i'll change my mind on that so that if you don't have a composition manager running you just get the classic "show desktop" effect? perhaps.
also remember that you will be able to put these widgets on panels or even free floating about. you will eventually also be able to go into "media center" mode and see widgets integrated there as well. huzzahs all around.
so yes, even with all your windows in the way, plasma will still be relevant to you. remember that it's replacing kicker (the panels and taskbar) too while bringing other presentation formats with it.
and this was all planned somewhere between 2 and 3 years ago (was i showing this stuff off in ludwidsberg? i can't remember now...). not to have thought of this issue would have been a pretty major oversight. to paraphrase jessica rabbit, "i'm not stupid, i'm just drawn that way."
13 comments:
How about just fading out the windows (completely) to show the desktop? I know Compiz/Beryl/CompComm does this (and it's pretty useful with superkaramba), but again, that might freak out some people accidentally hitting the show-desktop button... (AAAAAAAAAH! SCOTTY! BEAM MY WINDOWS BACK! *thud-thud*) Maybe pop up a warning tooltip first time it happens or something.
yeah, hiding windows tends to freak people out ;)
i'd rather either let the WM provide a "hide windows" feature (ergo why i'm not overly eager to provide overlay without a composition manager to help it) or else provide a translucent overlay so you can also see your windows in the background.
the overlay preserves visual context which tends to make people feel much more at ease, since "not there" is emotionally similar to "gone" which is a negative state.
I think one advantage of the Dashboard approach is that it doesn't require your desktop to contain the widgets. Cleanliness is next to godliness?
I'd agree that it doesn't change your workflow that noticeably. When going outside you might F12 to see the weather, but I haven't seen it used for much more than that. In that way it's like having a spare virtual desktop with the applets running on it. But there's only one of them, and it's easy to remember how to get to it.
aKademy was in Ludwigsburg =)
Sorry I have to be a bit fussy, because I live there ;)
btw. great Job you're doing, I think the reinvention of the desktop is a big turn. After 11 years, we can be the first OS Desktop to really get a head of M$ and maybe Apple in some points.
Would be great it think ;)
people without composite definitely need some kind of "show desktop" option somewhere, or else they'll probably never see their desktop. :)
I think having a fade in of one "widget" would be neat. Some key shortcut making only the widget located under the mouse cursors position fade to front. Would not give a "hide" all windows effect", but only hide the size of the widget.
Usually you don't need/want the whole desktop, but only information from one of the "widgets". And you in most cases you remember where they are located. Placing the mouse cursor somewhere, the underlying applet "fades" trough any windows and ends up on top.
Aaron, I really appreciate the efforts you put into Plasma and hope it will be ready and even useful some day. But please stop pretending your (?) idea is so overly innovative (anyone remember Konfabulator? or Bill Gates' Active Desktop?) or even intuitive. The latter may be true for you, but if it will be for real users is still to be seen. So far you have shown no evidence whatsoever in the form of user research that back up any of your assumptions.
Shouldn't we make sure the Plasma way actually really is the right one?
@anon: "But please stop pretending your (?) idea is so overly innovative"
well, point me in the direction of another production desktop that has zooming, widgets that travel or the rest of what we're doing.
plasma is not completely original, no, and that was never my intention. it is meant to be fun to make, fun to make things with and try some things that haven't been tried before or that have only been tried as addons or in academic settings.
sorry if it bugs you so much when someone is happy with what they are doing.
"(anyone remember Konfabulator? or Bill Gates' Active Desktop?)"
i remember both and aside from konfabulator having widgets fail to see the relevance.
" or even intuitive. The latter may be true for you, but if it will be for real users is still to be seen. "
yes, it remains to be seen if our exact implementation will be intuitive. but i'll say two things:
- nothing is intuitive, not even the nipple. it's all learned. so the question is, how easy is it to learn and is that learning rewarded?
- most of the concepts have been proven in one form or another via research done elsewhere in years past. i encourage you to dig into the literature, there are lots of gems floating about.
"So far you have shown no evidence whatsoever in the form of user research that back up any of your assumptions."
i'm not here to show you evidence, i'm here to write software. that doesn't mean the evidence doesn't exist, just that i'm not spending time spoon feeding it to you.
for the zooming aspect, for instance, go read up on Jef Raskin's "humane interface" project. the zooming concepts actually made it into real world products for real world users and enjoyed fantastic success when applied properly.
it's more fun to bitch though, i know.
Hi Aaron,
Now that I've updated my aging computer (yes, mostly for KDE4! :), I'm looking forward to KDE4's enhancements even more.
I'm still one of those people who will probably never see their desktop, and won't get much (but will get something) out of being able to move widgets in front of windows.
At the end of the day, I need status monitors, for CPU load, etc., which can stay on screen always, and won't be suddenly invalidated by the workload of actually showing them.
The ability to dock all of these widgets solves 90% of that problem, however, as you say. A few concerns remain, though:
* panel handling: will panels be more flexible than in KDE 3.x? I mean, will it be possible to put two panels on the right edge of the screen, top and bottom, for instance?
* Large panels: will it be possible to dock desktop-widget-sized stuff into a larger panel, which does stay visible? ie., to just dedicate more space for graphs etc. by using a large panel always, rather than having them collapse when put into a small panel (or worse, not fully utilize the space of a large panel)?
* Icons and scalability: what happens when we change resolution?
Could you have a think about adding widget/icon/panel profiles for different screen resolutions (perhaps just automatically tracking changes from the default resolution)?
I mean, let's say I'm in 1680x1050, and I change to 1024x768 temporily, work for a while, then change back. What happens to panels, and icons on the desktop? Will they know where to move to, and how to recover when moved back? E17 seems to solve this nicely, by having icon boxes that hold icons on the desktop.
Extending this concept, you could even have per-resolution and per-wallpaper overrides, that say something like "Don't put icons here, because then I can't see the coolest part of the wallpaper."; or, "This wallpaper has a nice bar in it, which suits being an icon area."; or, "I know I have icons in each corner in that res, but it doesn't work so well in this res; line them up along the top instead.
If icon boxes like this were in fact widgets that could be on the panel or on the desktop, it would be even better :)
Anyway. These are just some thoughts. I hope you'll take them on board, and be able to do something with them, but either way, you and other KDE4 devs are doing a great job -- thanks :)
--
Lee
For the record, in Mac OS X, dashboard applets can be moved from the dashboard layer to the desktop layer and back again.
It isn't a feature that's switched on by default, but hey with a proprietary desktop, you can't have everything, right?
Plasma handle layers, why don't just simple have a "Desktop Layer", "Dashboard Layer","Media Center Layer (which I already there, well, just the name xD)" and so on?
I'm not sure if this is relevant here, or just to the Amarok guys, but what I'd like to have is Amarok's visualisation as the desktop 'background'. Although I might want a picture behind that too.
Could that be done by the Amarok (or would that be libvisual?) guys putting the vis in a Plasmoid?
I think I gather from the discussions here that it would be possible to have a Plasmoid 'on top' of all windows, with user-set transparency, but for it to not get focus i.e. you can still interact with the windows under it?
I don't know if a bouncy vis overlaying your desktop, at any transparency, is practical if you actually want to be able to work in the windows behind it without getting a headache but I'd be interested to experiment :-)
There was some discussion about Amarok potentially showing movies if one is in the playlist. If this were to happen I'd like the movie to replace the vis in the plasmoid.
And the screensaver should pull said plasmoid to the front and make it 0% transparent :-)
Yes, there must be some kind of "show desktop" option somewhere.
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