Tokamak 4 commences on the 19th of February in Nuremberg. Novell will be hosting our band of merry developers, designers and dreamers. This Tokamak is going to be the biggest one yet with 25 participants, not counting the visitors we are expecting to swell those numbers even further.
At Tokamak 3 we invited a few people who weren't "strictly" in the Plasma project, including a KWin developer. That was due to a conscious realization at Tokamak 2 that our world in Plasma was not an island unto itself, but a larger expanse that touched or was touched by several other parts of KDE and beyond. Tokamak 4 is going one step further and we are actually hosting three parallel development sprints side by side: one for Oxygen, one for KWin and one for Plasma. These three projects have a large contact surface area with each other, so it's only natural to bring them together like this for a large sprint where we can get work done in our usual heads-down-and-moving fashion across the board. Obviously, Oxygen and KWin and not completely defined by Plasma, and vice versa, but we are trying to harmonize and improve our results together.
Due to the size of this Tokamak, even just counting the Plasma contingent, we will be hosting break-out groups each day covering different sub-topics. There will be a break out track for activities, and I think this is the Tokamak we finally nail that topic down with greater definition. I removed the zooming code from plasma-desktop the other day in preparation for what we will be replacing it with. I can already hear you asking, "What will you replace it with?" We'll all just have to wait for Tokamak 4 for more details, but here are tantalizing hints: it uses Nepomuk and it will blend in visually with the rest of KDE Plasma Desktop much better.
Another exciting break out group will be the Plasma On The Go track. In addition to Plasma Netbook, which is designed for mid-sized screens (it also supports multitouch), we will be diving into the new Plasma Mobile project. Plasma Mobile is meant for smaller devices such as smart phones. We will have at least one Intel based smartphone type device and some N900s to hack on. I'll also be lugging a MIPS based netbook with me (thanks, Armijn! :) so we'll have a bunch of different devices to work on. Hopefully we can get everyone who's interested set up in pair-programming teams around their own device. Marco and Alexis will both be hosting "how to develop on these things" workshops so everyone can get up to speed. There are some really interesting ideas floating around the Plasmasphere about interesting interaction workflows we can enabled with Plasma and Qt, especially using Kinetic and even QML. I've also heard that there are plans to do a Technical Preview in 2010 of Plasma Mobile on top of the Ubuntu stack, so the snowball is starting to grow here.
We'll keep all of you posted as Tokamak 4 progresses via our blogs, identi.ca and of course KDE's own TheDot. It's a big event with big challenges to tackle. I can't wait.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
What about the plasma media center? I didn't hear anything for a long time and I think it was a very interesting proyect.
Oh yes, I was drooling on the plasma media center idea for quite some time. Imagine this on one of these tablet devices. I am waiting for the notion ink adam on which I will put kde to replace my netbook. I just use it for surfing, picture/video viewing and music listening anyway. The ONLY use cases for an "iPad".
I'm afraid, at the moment the plasma media center is a project in need (key quest: identifying projects in need).
Cheers
Actually the MIPS notebook was bought by Ade and me together.
No doubt whatever you replace the ZUI with will be better by magnitudes. But could you also do a writeup/ link to a write up that explains how activities are "supposed" to be used? I currently use three just to separate my plasmoids into desktop/classes/network(widgets). While this works well, I keep getting the feeling that activities are supposed to be for better things (especially when you add words like nepomuk.) I haven't really used anything like activities on other DE's so I am a bit confused. Best of luck at tokamak.
@sealv: when the campkde videos are posted, watch mine. :)
@cruzki: "What about the plasma media center?"
it continues in fits-and-starts. right now we don't have the resources to pour more into it and the low end of the mobile space has more "fire" and opportunities for us, so we are addressing that first.
we have not abandoned or given up on the media center stuff, it just progresses at a slower rate due to fewer resources. we still don't even have a set release target for it, which is why i haven't said much about it.
"after" (which isn't quite the right word for it, you you get my meaning) Plasma Mobile, i want to shift some focus to Plasma Mediacenter.
this will give us a "four device spectrum" spread and open up many cool and real-world applicable use cases.
@sealv: besides Chani's presentation, i've also blogged about it in the past but it's probably time i did a write up for it and agregated all this content on the plasma website (which is like a walking zombie right now)
the short story is this: activities allow you to create aggregations of widgets that belong, by your own definition, together.
this is what you have already been doing, and that's great.
the missing pieces we have still to put in place are publishing the activities to the desktop using nepomuk, adding activity awareness to applications (e.g. by associating nepomuk metadata with activities, such as the "school" category from your contacts with your classes activity, making widgets more activity aware (e.g. a contacts widget might prefer to show the contacts that match the activity, the network plasmoid might decide to prefer or autoconnect to certain networks depending on the activity...)
still lots of work to do .... but we're getting there. the nepomuk service we started for 4.3 got delayed mostly by non-plasma-specific things, but it looks like we're definitely going to get that merged for 4.5.
Looking forward to hearing what you do with #QML!
Post a Comment