We are moving to a devel workflow in which we aim to have an "always-releasable" master branch. All development will happen in branches, something we essentially do already, but we will now also have an integration branch so we can bring the various branches together for testing before merging them when ready, branch by branch, into master. We have been working towards for some time, adjusting our habits one step at a time. This will only cover the plasma-mobile, share-like-connect and plasma-active-maliit repositories for now, but my hope is that as Frameworks 5 arrives we'll be able to broaden this to the bigger shared repositories such as kde-workspace.
We also set a release date target of March 26th, with betas and release candidates starting one month prior to that. So what do we plan on accomplishing between now and then?
Most of the core team's efforts are going to be focused on improving what was new in Plasma Active Three. We'll be focusing on one component at a time for review so we can document what needs improving, prioritize those items and then work on implementing the improvements in a time-boxed devel cycle, or sprint. We are starting with Files for the first three week sprint, and then will move on to Share Like Connect. Not all sprints will be the same length. Some will be only one or two weeks, all depending on how much needs doing and how much time we have.
One of the Maliit input system developers joined us at the meeting as well, which was great as we have a lot of work to do on the on-screen keyboard still. We are very much looking forward to the improvements that Maliit 1.0 will bring, but that won't be Plasma Active Four material. We will be working on bringing multiple layouts and improving some of the current ergonomics. Already a few annoyances and bugs have been fixed, and we recently merged in some changes to the default layout.
There are also some new feature sets in the pipeline for Plasma Active Four. Work on syncing is already well on its way with ownCloud and akonadi integration (Sebas will probably blog more about this later) and screen rotation support (thanks to JP). More and more, though, we'll be looking to others to work on new applications and feature sets such as these.
... and now for something completely different: screenshot porn of a few things already in master for the Plasma Active Four release.
11 comments:
delighted to hear about the owncloud integration, but a more general question for you:
do you anticipate plasma active being offered as a hot-swap desktop alternative alongside full-fat kde by the big distro's?
the reason i ask is the rapidly increasing number of hybrid laptop/tablet devices arriving with Windows8 on them.
i am thinking of the likes of the lenovo yoga, the asus taichi, and the samsung ATIV, as well as the various 'sliders' from MSI and Sony:
http://www.trustedreviews.com/best-windows-8-laptops-tablets-convertibles-and-pcs_round-up
the traditional laptop is going to be less and less relevant, and it would be nice if my favourite distro could keep up with the capabilities of the hardware......
"hot-swap desktop alternative"
we've done this for ~2 years with netbook / desktop already, and have been talking publicly about this kind of functionality with Active nearly since the beginning of the project.
so .. yes :)
"the traditional laptop is going to be less and less relevant"
and all applications run in the cloud and in web browser, just like we were promised 5 years ago, 10 years ago and 15 years ago. ;)
the 'post-pc' era is real in that the pc is no longer the only device form factor that is useful and readily available.
but there is a very real limit as to how irrelevant the desktop (in the form of laptops and actual desktop hardware) will become, just as there is a limit to how much has moved to the web.
that said (so nobody thinks we're simply trend hopping blindly here), i do think that "transformable" devices that change the UI in response to the runtime hardware configuration are a very hot idea and one that will see at least some demand.
as an aside, i have fond memories of laptop docking stations that were all the rage in the 90s ... :)
I'd also like to have the ability to easily switch between Plasma Desktop and Plasma Active.
I have a Lenovo convertible tablet laptop (x230) which I use for all my day to day work. KDE Plasma Desktop has become invaluable to me with it s activities as I keep all my projects on a separate activity. Too often I have to switch between different clients and their projects. Traditionally this was a nightmare because I'd do something for one client. Email them and while I wait, move onto another project and work with different files. The other client would come back and I'd have to load up/restore everything I need for that client, wasting much time, just to make a quick amendment, then switch back to the other project. With activities this is effortless.
I tested out an earlier Plasma Active (from Ubuntu precise repository) and it was awesome for when I had my laptop in tablet mode (ideal for scribbling in Krita and MyPaint).
Thing is (and apologies if this is different in newer versions of Active), Active wants to have all activities running all the time unlike Desktop where I start and stop what I want.
When being in a Desktop mode and switching over to the tablet mode and going on the move I've tried firing up plasma-active which semi worked but the two modes just refuse to play nice with each other (and active fires off all activities once started). So I would soooo love to be able to smoothly transition (it does not have to be visually slick. Just behave) between the two. As jedibeeftrix said. More and more convertible/touch laptops will be in use soon, and as you correctly said, the desktop is certainly not dead but devices are becoming even more multi-purpose suited. And unlike Windows 8, KDE does not make working with a touch optimise mode, alien to the desktop and cursor mode.
With the improved monitor handling in 4.10 I look forward to being able to dock in and have the desktop setup automatically all ready. And if I can just as easily switch over to a tablet mode. Well then I'm just spoiled :)
Thanks for all the hard work you people have put into this. World domination might actually be insight!
I looked at the screenshots, and while they look really nice, I'm kinda confused. So is slider to left on,or maybe that blueish color means on? I guess I'd understand red and green, or "on" and "off".
Also whats that 1/2 on the keyboard? That like shift for numbers? It took me a while to figure our that large arrow is shift, after looking down to my real keyboard. Maybe "ABC" "abc" or something like that would have made it clearer. Going with that maybe do like "123" "€$%" instead of the 1/2. For some reason I can't really make the connections from real keyboard to virtual keyboard so "real keyboard" signs don't seem to work for me.
Quite frankly: Plasma Active's release process is completely broken.
If you aim for "always releasable" master, release it together with the other Workspaces instead of an arbitrary date in between with the requirement (and that's the worst part) additional patches to kdelibs/kdebase/… – ensuring that no major KDE-focused distribution can ever pick PA up as additional offering.
"Always releasable" also means "always with incomplete translations". I tried KPA3 in a VM: It's the third major release and it's still only available in English.
This brings me to another broken part of the release process: You give Plasma Active major version numbers (written as English word to emphasize that PA is English-only I suppose), yet the individual components are all pre-release 0.x versions: ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/active/3.0/src/
So please fix your release process. Release the next version together with 4.10, incl. all string freezes for translators, and further 4.10.x bugfixes,…
@Unknown: yes, coloured means "on". this is fairly evident when you actually use it as the effect is fairly clear when toggling it.
yes, ?123 toggles to the symbols. there are essentially 4 layouts: lower case alpha; upper case alpha; symbols (e.g. numbers) 1 and symbols 2.
it's one of those things that as soon as you use it, it becomes quickly evident.
@Kurt Kugel: "release it together with the other Workspaces"
the six month fixed cycle does not work for Plasma Active.
"instead of an arbitrary date"
the date is not arbitrary.
"in between with the requirement (and that's the worst part) additional patches to kdelibs/kdebase/"
there are no required patches. all branches have been merged into master, and were there in the first place for a very simple reason: they were not completed so as to be usable in all workspace targets. once they reached that point, they were merged.
an example is the QML screen locker. it was in a branch because while it worked for PA, it needed more work to be generic enough to e used in Desktop, etc.
this has zero to do with the release date, process, etc.
"ensuring that no major KDE-focused distribution can ever pick PA up as additional offering."
rubbish. any distro could package PA3 right now with KDE SC 4.9.
if packagers are confused as to how to do this, they can ask questions and get support on active at kde.org.
"always with incomplete translations"
we have branches for each stable release. these branches can be translated just like any other release of any KDE software.
right now, the Active/3 branch is set to the "i18n stable branch" for the plasma-mobile repository.
the rest of the translatables come from kde-workspace, kde-runtime and kdelibs.
"You give Plasma Active major version numbers (written as English word to emphasize that PA is English-only I suppose)"
what an asinine comment. of course it isn't to emphasize any such thing. did it make you feel better to write that, though? i hope so, because then it will have done *some* good at least.
"yet the individual components are all pre-release 0.x versions"
we could call them 1.0. or 14.0. or 3.14159. they are not "pre-release" versions, they are simply the next version # in a numeric sequence: 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, etc.
at some point, yes, we will likely bump some or all to 1.0 and then they will see 1.1, 1.2, etc. releases
it has zero to do with quality on release nor does it have any relevance as to the release process or what the constituent pieces of the release are.
Hi great job, AMAROK will be ported to plasma active !!! in the future
I am looking at some of the new Windows 8 tablets and I also think the Plasma Desktop / Plasma Active combo could be _the_ killer setup. Microsoft is right, tablet applications should (must) work differently than desktop applications. But, computers like the Surface show us that pure tablets may not be a new device. Instead, they may be a transitional idea to get us to the real goal, a computer smart enough to act like a tablet when I'm using it like a tablet and a desktop when I want to use it as a tablet.
I think Microsoft screwed up big by creating two separate worlds in Windows 8 and forcing the user to jump back and forth between them. I think the Plasma Desktop / Plasma Active are better in as much as they are reusing the underlying systems and applications from the Desktop but giving them a more appropriate interface. Kmail / Mobile Mail are a good example. I can switch back and forth between the two and I see the same messages with the same state. But, one is enabled for the dekstop (Kmail) and one is enabled for the tablet.
The next real goal is to automate the context shift in some way or at least make it really really easy to switch. I don't think the current system to enable to netbook style plasma desktop is adequate because I could easily see me switching back and forth several times a day, depending on context. In contrast, the netbook desktop is, I assume, usually set and then left alone.
Is it possible for me to get that keyboard into a current installation of Plasma Active 3? It looks like it's QML on top of the Maliit engine, so my guess is the QML deals with the keyboard's layouts and such, so might it be possible for me to just find and plug in the new QML in and get the new keyboard? Really missing the tab key tbh x)
Jason: yes, you can just copy over the QML from the plasma-active-maliit git repository and it will "just work"
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