Working on a set of presentations for a corporate project, Sebastian and I put together some content covering KDE and Plasma topics over the weekend. We thought it would be cool to share some of the results with you. Note that the slides are not designed for use at a conference (too much text and rather brief) but rather as an aide to introducing technical management type people to some of the key concepts.
I should probably upload the screencast to Youtube.com so that people can find it there as well. There is also no cheesy outro music or many highly technical details as my screencasts often have because it was meant for a management meeting. I did manage to throw one or two "inside jokes" in, such as the clock reference, but it's all pretty staid and maybe even a bit boring. Hopefully, however, it's useful.
You can at least get a glance (though at a low framerate due to the screencapture software) at the new applet handles. =)
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35 comments:
Great! Plasma is now the best desktop shell ever :D I'm using KDE4 from SVN everyday and i'm rly happy of it.
Great stuff.
I'm off to the trawl suse and other forums to find out how to launch the data-engine explorer.
@maninalift: the command name is plasmaengineexplorer .. long and odd, but it's a dev tool more than anything else.
Very impressive Aaron :) It's great to see KDE 4.x starting to reach its potential :)
Great screencast. Next time please add the dashboard widget to the desktop to demonstrate that it simply works ;-)
I use kde4 svn and its great, the only problem is that some plasmoids crash whole plasma, so it's a hassle to experiment with plasmoids. Apart from it its great. Every day getting better
Is there any plan to make plasmoid operations (move, resize,...) more user friendly (see bug #164355)? Currently it seems that you are forcing user to use applet handles only because you can animate its (dis)appearing.
@maki: plasma self-restarts, so it's really not a huge issue IME; scripting becoming more popular will help a lot though.
@vedranf: those two things (reason for the handles, resizing mechanics) are completely unconnected in terms of why they are there.
the big issue right now with resizing is that it's done from the center of the widget; that really needs to be reworked as it's not overly convenient for most widgets.
@Aaron: No, you misunderstood me. The biggest issue is that one cannot move/resize plasmoids like windows. To put it simple, it takes 0.5sec to move/resize a window from one position/size to another and 3sec to do the same with a plasmoid using applet handles. Look at last two comments on that bugreport.
Currently you have to move a mouse pointer over a plasmoid, wait for handle to appear, find right icon on it, move mouse (again), click on the icon and move the mouse (again). You don't have to be usability expert to see that something is wrong here.
@vedranf
I'm confused....can't you just 'grab' most plasmoids (clock for example) by just click-and-holding them and instantly drag them to where you want them?
@Socceroos: Yes, but not every. For example you can't move folderview in that way. That confuses users because it sometimes works and sometime doesn't. Interface should be consistent. And you still have problems with resize/rotate.
Look at E17, it's much better:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10kg2aSB8q4
If you combine this (E17) and also add possibility to use keyboard modifiers (alt+RMB=resize) as one can already do that with regular windows you'll get a very usable interface (compared with what you have now). I hope we'll have this for 4.2.
@vedranf
I see what you're saying about E17. But if you take a look at it, you'll notice that its another option hidden in a submenu that you have to enable before you can move and edit your widgets. Basically, you're trading speed at one point for slowness at another. At least with Plasma you don't have to disable 'editing widgets' to get rid of the visual clutter around them.
Also, looking at the video you linked to, i really don't like what happens when you sit two widgets close together...it becomes a horrible visual mess!
Why is the video in patent-encumbered MP4/MP3 format?
Open formats are the only way to guarantee an open web
@vedranf: magical edit modes suck since the assumption is that you are either editing or you are not and if you want to edit you need to know the magic incantation (right click -> menus).
big gaudy things hanging off on every edge look fugly as well.
there are tradeoffs to be had with various approaches.
the biggest downside to what we have right now, something you seem to not care about, is that we resize the from the center.
we *might* offer edge dragging at some point, but it will never be exactly like windows and certainly not like in that hideous video of e17. (e17 has some very cool technology, that video was just one big demonstration of how you can abuse it into uselessness; backgrounds ALWAYS MOVING?)
@Kevin Koffler: i appreciate your viewpoint, but you are preaching to the choir. (which is to say, i already agree with that sentiment)
but you see, the management team i made this for all have computers with proprietary operating systems that don't have ogg vorbis codecs installed on them. surprise! asking them to do so was not an option in this case:
"hey, will you invest in our stuff? oh, but before you do .. can you install all this other software so you can watch the presentations that you will base your decisions on? i mean, your time can't be worth that much, right? welcome to freedom!"
that doesn't work so great, ime ;)
sometimes i have to grant others some affordances in the process of helping them take steps towards freedom.
now .. why is it here on my blog then? i thought i'd share my work with others instead of keeping it between myself and the handeful of people it was made for.
@aaron cheers, I thought I'd tried that but clearly not. I just wanted it to help diagnose little issues I was having with plasma.
@makji / @aaron - ime these crashes can lead to the plasma being left in states that cause it to crash more often / not function properly resulting in a rather Windows-like spiral of instability (crashes cause more errors, cause more crashes) which is fixed by wiping all the plasma rc files. I agree that if plasma restarts it is not a great problem, so long as it also becomes more robust to finding it's self in a bad state and/or fixes bad states.
Also these restarts could be unsettling to a user therefore a message "Plasma restarted because application X crashed" would lay the blame where it is due and help the user avoid further problems.
@vedranf / @aaron (on E17) he he he. Constantly moving wallpaper, then you stand up and fall over. Have they not heard of the waterfall effect. E17 appears to have some good technology (though I don't know much about it) but the design always seemed to me a little adolescent (steampunk windows and animated flash every time a new menu item is highlighted?).
hi aaron,
regarding the codec - at least windows can't play this without installing ffdshow, vlc or divx with changing the 4cc of the video (afaik).
See here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=95313
So don't be surprised if $manager can't play this nice screencast...c
Great stuff, love KDE 4.x every day more!
Is there a way to switch from one plasma activity to another without zooming in and out? Would be awesome to have
'd just like to point out another obvious usability/bad UI point - that thing in the top right corner of the screen.
Not only does it look a bit shit (sorry! I'm sure it's theme-able but it does kind of ruin the cleanness of the desktop), but at one point in the video you had to try about three times to click one of the buttons!
@Tim
He had such a hard time because a window was in the way.
@Gizzmo: so far no complaints =)
@Mamarok: the Activity Switcher plasmoid will likely be in 4.2 .. marco martin blogged about it recently.
@Tim: the plan is to expand the toolbox into a toolstrip under the containment when zoomed out.
Just when i want to ask if you can do the same thing E17 can, you post in another comment that you find this idea really stupid.
I am talking about the moving wallpaper stuff. Can KDE do this? I think you could do really nice effects with this. Just imagine a great cherry blossom tree where the leaves are falling slowly down to the ground of your desktop. I really want to try such a moving wallpaper if you can work with it. In my fantasy it will look gorgeous.
But back to my question: Can KDE do this at the moment (perhaps even use the E17 wallpapers)?
WHat it plasma browser?
What is it's name and where can i download it?
@Member of the Bookwatch: yes, we can do animated and interactive wallpapers. (there's an interactive mandelbrot paper in svn right now.) we even support the e17 file format for animation.
however, in the e17 screencast that was linked to a nice demo paper was in use but one that's rather impractical for daily use. too much movement in terms of both speed and number of pixels.
what you suggest is something a lot more calm and intermittent.
pretty much any constant movement in the background, however, tends to be pretty distracting. it competes with animations elsewhere which are usually used to focus attention on changing or important items. the human eye is very sensitive to motion, and too much is not good.
many of the e17 videos show that just because you can be flashy doesn't mean you should.
canola, which uses the e17 media format, shows how you can use that same set of tools to do things that are elegant.
@Ujjwol Lamichhane: it's in playground right now and is called "minibrowser"
You know what technical management types really like?
Boney M :)
@Socceroos:
"you'll notice that its another option hidden in a submenu that you have to enable before you can move and edit your widgets"
Yes, I know, same is with plasma, there is lock/unlock widgets action. I understand if you didn't noticed that as there no difference when you are in locked or unlocked mode. Usability hell all over the place, I know.
"Basically, you're trading speed at one point for slowness at another. "
Nope. :-(
"At least with Plasma you don't have to disable 'editing widgets' to get rid of the visual clutter around them."
That's a feature, a good one. In plasma "visual clutter" (dis)appears whenever you move you mouse over your desktop.
"Also, looking at the video you linked to, i really don't like what happens when you sit two widgets close together...it becomes a horrible visual mess!"
Good observation! Now, how to fix that? It easy to draw the handles on top of the plasmoid, not beside it.
@Aaron:
"magical edit modes suck since the assumption is that you are either editing or you are not and if you want to edit you need to know the magic incantation (right click -> menus)."
?? Same is with plasma. Right click -> unlock widgets. Also, I don't know what you have against context menus. It's well established GUI concept since Xerox Alto.
If you want to break well established GUI conceps, why don't you change basic window operations then? Disable window decoration, keyboard shortcuts and add "window handle". I would call that a progress. :-)
Or see inkscape of example. I know, it has nothing to do with plasma but you also have objects that you can modify like plasmoids. Note that there is nothing like "applet handle". It has better/faster way of modifying its objects. Why is that?
"big gaudy things hanging off on every edge look fugly as well. "
No they are not. You can draw them on top of the widget if you want so they won't "hang off".
"there are tradeoffs to be had with various approaches."
Please elaborate. It is much better/usable that in edit/unlocked mode you *always* show some kind of applet handles so that one can move immediately to them and not to hover before. *It IS faster!* See last few comment on that bugreport I mentioned before.
"certainly not like in that hideous video of e17. "
Why not?
"backgrounds ALWAYS MOVING"
It's bad, but I don't care, that's not the topic here.
I have two ideas for Plasma:
I would like to have Lua support for scripting, Lua is little and neat programming language for embedding, and while I love Ruby, Python and JS support, I think Lua would be of great addition.
Lua is used in another projects like FreeSWITCH, Asterisk and Awesome 3.
You can read about Lua here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)
Another thing I would like to see is some kind of "protected core" for Plasma, so if a plasmoid crashes the whole thing still runs and you only see a message or log of what happened but the desktop is still intact.
Just some thoughts, I love plasma, keep up the great work =D
"I think Lua would be of great addition"
why?
if it's just a "because i think it would be cool" then get in there and start hacking on a ScriptEngine .. but i don't see an actual compelling reason for Lua other than "it exists and some people know it".
"if a plasmoid crashes the whole thing still runs"
yes, that's the point of introducing scripting.
but for c++ stuff? i'm not all that interested in trying to create some horribly complex system of separate processes passing rendering information back and forth to each other over IPC. not only would that be horrendously complex, it would be really brutal on resources .. all to prevent a restart that takes a second in the worst case.
@Vedranf
"?? Same is with plasma. Right click -> unlock widgets."
With Plasma, the only reason you'd lock your plasmoids is because you are happy with your setup and don't want to change it.
BUT, if you're the kind of person who will change things on your desktop often then having it unlocked is useful.
Now, the main difference between E17 and Plasma here is that if your a 'changy' person then in E17 you constantly have to access a submenu before you can even begin to make changes (even just to one widget) - whereas in plasma you only need to hover over the particular object you wish to change and do what you need. No need for a submenu and the visual clutter dissapears without you needing to then go and re-disable the enabled edit mode.
In the end, the method you're favouring is only quicker if you're not going to change whats on your desktop much. A lot of people aren't like that. I have a brother-in-law with a Mac, his dashboard is constantly changing, he is always adding and removing stuff. E17's approach is going to make this kind of a user *very* frustrated.
"Basically, you're trading speed at one point for slowness at another.
Nope. :-("
Yes it is, see the example above. For a user who is changing their widgets/plasmoids often, E17's approach is far far too slow and clunky.
Hey aaron! since your leading the pack in beautifying KDE, why not have your hands on the widget theme and its overall layout too? the layout is really awful compared to gnome especially the dolphin's. for the widget theme, could you make something contemporary like what you have in your Plasma? or a framework maybe?
note: this is not a rant.. it's just a mere request from a typical user coming from the windows land...
Thank You! More power to KDE!
@Socceroos:
"With Plasma, the only reason you'd lock your plasmoids is because you are happy with your setup and don't want to change it."
Yes, once you set it up, you'll change it rarely.
"BUT, if you're the kind of person who will change things on your desktop often then having it unlocked is useful."
Probably only few users, but OK, I see your point. Still, forcing users to move mouse more than necessary is plain stupid. This could be simply circumvented by adding keyboard modifiers, for example:
move: alt + left mouse button
resize: alt + right mouse button
...
I use this for window operations for years. Why Aaron doesn't want to add this obvious feature is beyond me.
@vedranf
Yeah, I agree that some keyboard modifiers for this would be very handy.
I'm waiting for 4.2.
I have posted you video on youtube.
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=RxCK0eWV4h4
Hi Aaron, I was watching your nice overview of KDE 4.2 and it suddenly occurred to me (as I watched you clicking the Plasma icon to zoom in and out of different desktops) that clicking the Plasma icon and then clicking again to zoom out again seems cumbersome, arbitrary, fiddly, not really natural... Know what I mean ?
I don't really have any great inspirations on how this could be improved other than maybe having the cashew pop open as soon as you mouse over it to make zooming out a single click operation, but this might be a start.
Apart from someone maybe accidentally clicking on something they didn't mean to, would this pose any problems ?
@Jeremy: "maybe having the cashew pop open as soon as you mouse over it"
we tried this in 4.0; it caused various problems for people.
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