In a nutshell, Plasma Active is about getting the KDE Platform with Plasma providing a compelling user interface ready for and available on hardware devices outside the usual laptop and desktop form factors. While we continue to do a pretty good job on our traditional turf, we have work ahead of us if we wish to realize the dream of covering as much of the device spectrum as possible.
Plasma Netbook was one important step in that direction, and it helped us understand how much further we needed to go. Projects such as Kontact Touch, Marble To Go, Caligra Touch, KDE Games for mobile (among others) are raising facing many of the same challenges. We need a reference, from top to bottom, that provides an installable image with a common build of the KDE Platform, great integration between selected applications and a primary user interface that is relevant to the hardware (e.g. touch centric) and great to use. Ultimately, we aim to create an active, open, non-exclusive ecosystem around KDE software for consumer devices and work on getting those devices into your hands.
Our immediate goal is to lay the foundation for an open, active and inclusive initiative with as many participants as possible to work towards this common end. With the help of community members like the Sebastians (Trug and Kügler :) and Marco as well as companies such as Basyskom and Open SLX we have made a start on working towards this vision.
We have divided the current work up into five concurrent tracks, each of which represents a different aspect of what is needed to meet our goal. We are working to coordinate all of these paths and make sure they are working together. Over time, we may add more tracks, but for now we have our plates full.
During the first meetings where we discussed this set of ideas, I was reminded of a train system, with different tracks carrying different trains with various cargo on a sharp time schedule to arrive at a common destination. This became my personal internal visualization of what we were setting out to do, and so I eventually sat down a drew it out:
Those "stops" on the lines aren't arbitrary, either. They each represent a specific interim goal or an announcement we plan on making. Some of these stops will be well advertised in advance, such as the September release date for Contour, others we'll reveal over time. We're trying not to overwhelm with information on the one hand, and we have details to work out for some of the other milestones before we can commit publicly to the details. We should have new information and progress to show every single week and there will be lots of opportunities for others to join in as well.
Over the next five blog entries, I'll cover each of the five current tracks, what the plans are, how you can get involved and how it fits in with the Plasma Active vision.
- Plasma Quick (Monday)
- Contour (Tuesday)
- Active Apps (Wednesday)
- Operating Systems (Thursday)
- Vendor Support (Friday)
p.s. I'm not an artist, so the image looks fairly .. er .. lack luster in the artistic accomplishment category. ;) If you'd like to help bring it to life, the source SVG is right here.
p.p.s. I've whipped up a little Plasmoid that shows the latest Plasma Active related news and the progress of each track as we go. It fetches the data from plasma.kde.org and is still a work in progress. In fact, it even revealed a small bug in libplasma I fixed and which will be in the next 4.6.x release as well. I'll continue to refine it and will do a proper release of it in coming weeks. It will, however, allow those who wish to follow us in to do so in a fun and convenient way. :)
10 comments:
So, did I understand it right, that
Contour is a concept of a UI for adaptive activities and intelligent recommendations;
Plasma Active is a UX based on (beside others) that concept?
PS: The concept looks really nice so far (as long as I get the possibility to say: "Hey, this conclusion was wrong. Even with 100 pictures that show grandma, I don't want to send them to anyone!")
Is "9.10.11" supposed to be a European-style date?
Yes. =)
No.
"dd.mm.yyyy" is a German/Russian/Ukrainian date format.
"dd-mm-yyyy" is also used by European countries.
"yyyy-mm-dd" is the official date format of the EU (European Union). And by law all member states must support this format.
Aaron, what would be the easiest way to install your plasmoid?
I think DD-MMM-YYYY to be the best compromise out of all of them.. With the three letter month, there is no confusion between the number of the day and the number of the month..
In EU there is two ways
The typical dd.mm.yyyy
ISO standard yyyy-mm-dd
The month needs always be with numbers, not with letters. And month is always between day and year.
The usually seen US typed mm.dd.yy or mmm.dd.yyyy is terrible as it is hard to notice what date actually is and what month was "October" or so on if english is not so easy.
Again, that depends on which side of the pond that you live on....
In the US, we'd say that the EU way of doing it dd.mm.yyyy is horrible and confusing because that's not the order that you would typically say the date...
April 14th 2011 is how you would say the full date and it becomes abbreviated as MM.DD.YYYY so we see our way of doing it as being much more logical than the EU / ISO standard.
The DD-MMM-YYYY has a perfect compromise between the US/EU date formats..
It has the Day.Month.Year ordering of the EU that they expect and it has the three letters of the month for clarification to people in the USA who expect the month to be first.
I like how this turned into a debate on date formats (personally to me YYYY MM DD makes the most sense, especially for sorting and reporting).
Thanks Aaron for sharing this and I look forward to more.
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