In the screen cast, I don't cover the content creator side of it, which is how application developers, artists, etc. can make their creations available to others, but I will do so in a future episode.
I am very happy with how it has shaped up so far, to the point that it is how I get eBooks onto my laptop now. :) It is a really enjoyable application to use that looks nice and works smoothly. Or at least I think so ... watch the video below and let us know what you think! (Please keep in mind that the screen capture software misses some of the animations or makes them appear slower than they are in actuality.)
As I mentioned near the end of the video, we have a lot more planned for the application such as the Collections concept. It is Free software and you are all invited to join in and help us
25 comments:
If you have to disconnect to get to the main screen, I think there should not be a "Add account" button but "Connect or Log in", something like this. People are used to this words and already know what it will do which is good.
@Alliance: you never really need to get to the first screen; it's only shown when there is no account set up on the device.
On subsequent launches it just automatically logs you in without stopping at the first screen.
I will do some more testing with the opening screen language, though ..
Cheers ...
Very interesting and shaping up nicely, thanks Aaron.
Quick question: I see fonts have the typical anti-aliasing I tend to change myself (from medium to slight hinting). Is there a posibility to do that kind of tweaking on Plasma active?
Additionally, will it be possible to add proprietary codecs to be able to play music and/or video encoded with those formats on the vivaldi device?
Are you planning to put games or paid apps in the application?
Will it have some free/not free filter?
Will it have ratings or comments?
Will it show up some information about the license?
Looks pretty, btw :-).
Criticism:
* Cloud computing sucks. Technology is supposed to grow features like storage, not reduce them, therefore external needs are mainly commercial based and a detriment to users.
* paying for a screen background. hmmmm
* full screen apps makes the device clumsy. Better to be able to visualise many events, with the ability to full screen when say reading.
OMG Aaron that scrolling and scrollbars look so good and professional. Same scrollbars should be in next kde release ;)
Considering it's about a completely free-as-in-open tablet, it's fairly ironic that the video works only with flash, and the "download as ogg" link actually gives me a 40K video consisting only of "you can only watch this with the blip player"...
@Chema: I did that on my laptop, actually, as I don't have a video camera here with reasonable resolution. I'm "lazy" and just did a screen capture.
(.. and yes, that means it works just fine on the desktop too :)
So I wouldn't judge the fonts there; they look a bit different on the device. You can, however, configure it. The system settings application isn't included, but all the important control panels are and you can type in a search term like "font" in the Search and Launch area to get to them
@alvarolara.com: yes, there will be paid apps and games. and just as proprietary software is offered at times at no monetary cost, we expect that there will be both Free and non-Free software with price tags. we will be encouraging Free software, of course, and the tablet comes stocked with a nice collection of (Free) software pre-installed such as Calligra and Kontact Touch.
@ChALkeR: "Will it have some free/not free filter?"
this is an often requested feature from the open source crowd, and we have been listening :) it did not make it into this first release, but we will eventually be putting filters such as these into the settings.
we also have support for addition "filterables" such as content ratings so it can be made "parent controls" friendly easily as well.
"Will it have ratings or comments?"
yes, though we don't like how most (ok, any!) of the current app stores out there do it. one big long, non-threaded, non-topical blahblahblah and 5 dinky stars aren't all that great in our opinion.
and it seems, according to the market research we've been reading, that both content developers and users agree.
so we put this off for the first version as what we want to do will take a bit more effort. the result should be worth it though :)
"Will it show up some information about the license?"
yes, it should appear in the info column. i actually only noticed that the wallpapers did not have licensing tags when i was making the screencast. if they had them in the database (easy to add, thankfully) then they would show up.
"Looks pretty, btw"
thanks :)
@e8hffff: "Cloud computing sucks."
i agree that it isn't the panacea some try to make it out to be. the Add-On App isn't about cloud computing, however, anymore than apt-get/zyper/yum are :)
"paying for a screen background. hmmmm"
as i noted in the video, that data is just on our devel server which we use for testing. on the dev testing system we use the wallpapers catalog to test the purchasing workflow.
we don't plan to charge for wallpapers, at least not the ones we provide; there may be artists who wish to do so.
"full screen apps makes the device clumsy"
on a smaller screen, and with an easy way to switch between apps, i would disagree. managing multiple overlapping windows on a small device that you are carrying around with you is not particularly easy.
of course, it's an open device so you can try out all sorts of things on it :)
Does it support multiple stores?
And how does the first page look then?
@jaso: we are all very happy with how it is looking. we're using the stock Plasma QML Components (and improving them as needed as we go, of course; upstream ftw!) so this is what you can expect to see from all QML apps on the platform. pretty nice, huh? :)
note that the Components have a desktop variant, a difference which is transparent to the application, so some things that are a little oriented towards mobile do render differently on the desktop.
in any case .. QML and Components are making it really easy to make really gorgeous applications :)
@Thomas: "Considering it's about a completely free-as-in-open tablet, it's fairly ironic that the video works only with flash,"
the web is broken. don't shoot me over that. :) thankfully it seems with html5 video that these things may be slowly improving.
" and the "download as ogg" link actually gives me a 40K video consisting only of "you can only watch this with the blip player"... "
did you click the correct link? i just grabbed the file from the link in my blog entry and got a perfectly valid 51MB Ogg video file.
@chaosjug: "Does it support multiple stores?"
Not the first version, no. You can change the store address manually in the configuration file. This is not particularly elegant, however, and we do want to make it possible (and easy) to pull in multiple stores, without disrupting the simple workflow that is there now too much.
Right now I'm thinking that a small checkbox that says something like "Use the default store ()" would be enough; uncheck it and a place to enter a domain would appear.
Then in the settings, the ability to add or remove stores and accounts.
There are a few options for how we could represent stores in the browse UI. If there is more than one, each store/account could appear in the left where the categories are right; or there could be a store switcher down in the status area (where it shows points); or .. etc. I haven't really thought about this part too much.
It's a little academic until we have the first one up and running and then start to see more stores popping up. So we have time, and this is something the dev and design team have discussed.
Looks gorgeous! Love the way it displays and the various sliding panels. Like others I'd like to see options for filtering things down, but you've clearly said that's coming.
My only real crit would be the 1920's style make play live font.
I get the same problem with the video link, a 38k file with one frame that just shows a blip.tv logo saying that the file is only viewable in the blip.tv player. I have a feeling it's something new that blip has implemented that only kicks in when a video is downloaded directly more than X times. Possibly they avoid doing it if they can see that the link is being clicked on by the original the content creator... I've seen this in a few places across the web just in the last few days though.
Link to http://blip.tv/file/get/Aseigo-MakePlayLiveAddOnsAppOverviewV1449.ogv redirects to http://j42.video2.blip.tv/5560010393798/Potatono-OOPViews677.mp4 for some reason :)
One thing that's often missing in application stores clients is the link to the source / project page and clear licensing info for proposed software. Label "Free" is not sufficient really.
It would be nice to see something like GPL, BSD, MPL etc. label and a link to the project / source page for open source applications, and clear licensing info (or link to it) for proprietary options.
The video link still doesn't work. Any chance of getting a mirror somewhere?
So weird thing, the video link only seems to work if i dl it on my android device.
Im fixing it. Aaron has enough to worry about :P Gimme like 5-10 minutes
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vo0qwm40qhtun74/Aseigo-MakePlayLiveAddOnsAppOverviewV1449.ogv
Link for video download
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