Category Archives: KDE

Post Latinoware Post :)

User Experience with Different Devices

It has been some time that I had some ideas regarding different devices. My first try was with the so famous “Mysterious Device” that we had during Tokamak 3 and later I played a little bit with my N85 and QtS60.

Qt Everywhere: yes, this means a lot of things. For Nokia it means that the same framework will be available for different platforms, for users that they will have more software being developed and for us, developers, that we can bring our software for all the devices that Qt is ported to.

Let’s also talk a little bit about platforms: Nokia has been playing with Maemo for some time now and the platform itself is pretty mature. Of course it will have problems but it’s pretty mature and compared to a lot of others out there it’s much better. But Maemo was “confined” to internet tablets…a device that was not good enough to be a netbook and not small enough to be a phone. It was “just” a pocket computer.

However the scenario changed and now we have a mobile phone running Maemo out there (N900) and Nokia learned the lesson about how to attract open source developers (just think that while Apple charge developers to get the full SDK and deploy their software, Nokia gives big discounts on new devices for developers).

I was pretty sad that I couldn’t go to Maemo Summit and show my ideas to everybody out there and it became worse when I saw that everybody there had their N900 and would be able to create awesome stuff for the device. This is one of the downsides of living in Brazil: it’s almost impossible to get/buy new hardwares without paying huge taxes and the developers program always helped on this matter. Too sad =/. BUT it seems that today was my lucky day! I (and some others) received a mail saying that we would receive a discount on an N900! Awesome! So now it will be possible to do all the stuff I was planning to do!

Plasma Netbook is one of my main objectives for the short/mid term (take a look here for the last news). It has a lot of potential and a lot of great ideas around it. We already received good reviews even in “less than alpha” state and we’re looking for companies that want to sell their stuff with something that will provide a unique user experience. If you are interested, contact us…we can explain our ideas and provide details about it. Also know we have Marco working full time on this, while I’m working full time on Qt and others are keeping plasma up to shape.

And probably you’re asking yourself why you should be interested in what I said above. The reason is just below. Take a look at the pictures and at the videos.

Shared Plasmoid on N900

I didn’t use Plasma netbook for this demo because I needed to recompile some stuff and it’s much better in a real netbook. This demo I’ll do during my talk on Latinoware. But for those that can’t go, I’ll talk a little bit: user experience is more than what the user does in front of his computer. It’s all about tasks. Recently, Rob integrated into KDE 4.4 his wonderful SoC called Remote Widgets. This enables two machines to share Plasma content in a very nice and easy way (I don’t even need to say that developers using libplasma get this feature for free, do I ?).

Original Plasmoid on Desktop (written using Javascript)

For me it was a pretty clear path to go. I want to share my widgets (that helps me during my day-to-day tasks) between different devices, so I can “take” them with me even if I leave my computer. This can be applied to many plasmoids and this is just a demo. I get a plasmoid that is in my desktop and share it with my mobile phone (in this case an N900 that a friend that went to Maemo Summit led me for this weekend). Pretty simple and easy to achieve (ok, it was hard to record the movie, talk and do all the stuff at the same time hehe). For security reasons it asks for pin codes between the two devices (just like bluetooth pairing – and you can have trusted devices too) and you can even save your passwords using KWallet :).

(if you can’t see the video above, try going here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1qxdYAUBbk)

Thanks to Mek and Darktears for sharing Qt/KDE compile problems in scratchbox, Vudentz for the device and Aaron and work mates for calming me down when I was compiling all the stuff 🙂 Any questions are welcome and remember that we can extend this a lot! (preempting one question: yes, it’s possible to share the “now playing” plasmoid and control your Amarok from the device 😉 ).

Cheers!

Small status update

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After Tokamak III I was not able to work that much on netbook stuff because we’re reaching the 4.6 release and we have a lot of work to be done on anchor layouts. We’re fixing the last bugs (that we know of course :P) so we can provide a really nice new layout for everybody using Qt. By the release of 4.6, Qt will be one step closer to make it easier to create rich UIs.

This week, Marco showed you how fast the netbook stuff is going on, it’s really awesome. It’s also very good to see how the netbook shell benefits from all the work being done on libplasma as well, like the integration with remote widgets. I had some nice ideas regarding integration with open Desktop stuff, let’s see if I can work on it during the weekend. I’m really looking forward the “social aspect” of KDE and how we can improve this. However, no spoilers before I get something done :).

By the end of the month (22-24 of October) I’ll give a talk on Latinoware about netbooks. I’ll use a lot of stuff from my GCDS talk but now I’ll have a lot of stuff to show off too, so I must change some bits of the presentation. On the other hand I think that this one will be much fancier and nicer to watch than the GCDS one that was more “theoretical” because all the work was at the very beginning. To show the power of remote widgets I’m planning to show a remote widget running on my netbook and also on a N900! This is not hard to achieve but I must have some time to put my hands on it.

This is the first time that I blog through an application instead of doing through the web editor. Blogilo just arrived on svn (at least for me :P) and I decided to give it a try. It’s really nice! It has all the features that the web editor gave to me like a visual editor, HTML editor and even a post preview. It supports categories (couldn’t find support for tags yet the tag support is just below it hehe) and also something like an auto configure based on the URL of your blog…really nice! I’m just missing it as a plugin for Kontact that is the place where I keep all my PIM stuff. Ah, talking about PIM I learned some nice stuff from Akonadi that I didn’t know with the series of blog posts on planet KDE about it.

KDE blog client

Ah, and before I forget: congrats to Amarok team for the release this week! I’m a “trunk user” but I know how good and stable the release is!

White as Snow

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Well, last day of Tokamak. It’s sad that I must say goodbye to all of these people that actually lived with me for one week. It was so intense that I almost didn’t realize that we were together for one week. But let’s talk about what we did during the sprint.

During the first days I talked with everybody I could about anchor layouts, animated layouts and Qt stuff. It was great as it’s hard to explain the stuff and get feedback from a lot of great hackers at once and as fast as we can get when we are in this kind of developer sprints. We had great discussions about Qt, regarding bugs, features, future and everything else we could talk about. I really can see that every time that we put all these great hackers in the same room, we save some months (maybe years?) of development. All of that to make you take less time to code 😉

Plasma Developers

While everybody else was merging their brand new stuff on trunk, commiting bug fixes and new features I was fighting with cross compiling KDE to the “mysterious device” that Aaron brought to us. What I could achieve ? We have KDE 4.2.X working PERFECTLY on this device, with all the features and beauty that KDE could bring to you. It runs really really fast on this ARM device. We were all impressed!

And then came the second part of the experiment: run trunk on it. While it was ok to compile stuff on scratchbox using Maemo SDK, the lack of a proper SDK for the device gave us some headache: some bug on qmake prevented it to detect correct paths and made me find out each library that was not properly added to cmake’s links.txt file and correctly add it. By the end of kdebase compilation I already had almost all the names and did a script to fix that, but until the time I found out all the libraries it was compiling and stopping all the time (I don’t need to tell that it was really slow to compile and due to this problem, it was even slower).

After some days I finally had kdelibs + plasma-destkop and plasma-netbook compiled. However when we put all this stuff on the hardware we faced a problem with Svg files not being show. So althoughf we have plenty new stuff full of new features running on the device, it looks a little bit “ugly” without the proper background, etc.. we just have white background…white as snow. But come on…we just had a few days with the device…we can do MUCH more with it and imagine if we had a proper SDK ? We can make this hardware AWESOME with our software and I can only hope that we’ll have some more time with it in the next months…(we would need less than 1 month with a proper SDK to make it really really really ROCK!).

Ah, meanwhile it was compiling kdelibs I created the pastebin dataengine/service, migrated the pastebin applet to use that and also fixed some bugs on other applets…

Talking about snow, today was the first day I saw snow in my life 🙂 It was a unique experience for me :). It’s really hard to describe with words how happy I was and how beautiful it was in the top of that mountain. Thanks Mario for this trip…it was one of those moments in our lifes that you never forget.

Tomorrow morning I’m heading to Brazil again. It was an awesome sprint. If someone asks me what comes next from my point of view, I would answer: running plasma-netbook on the “mysterious device” (please, I just need one week with a proper SDK 😉 ), finishing and optimizing anchor layout for Qt 4.6 (I really hope this will help people out there to create rich UIs with Qt) and of course: keep all the stuff we have discussed during Tokamak going on!

Randa View

Thank you Mario, thank you Plasma developers, thank you Qt/INdT and thank you KDE 🙂 What a wonderful personal and professional experience.

Tokamak 3

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I’m at Tokamak 3 in Randa where Mario is hosting us. First of all, thanks to Mario: everything is perfect!

Great landscape surrounding us

During the last days we had presentations, meetings and talks. The GSoC projects are being merged in trunk (a lot of great features coming: new widgets explorer, mouse plugins, remote widgets, plasmate), the netbook stuff is going on, Qt stuff being solved, etc..

I talked about QGraphicsAnchorLayout, the new layout engine that will be present on Qt 4.6 and even did a small demo about that. We are nailing down the remaining bits (API, bugs) and hopefully we’ll have an awesome layout engine to create rich UIs when Qt 4.6 comes to “the streets” !

I’m also working with Alexis (darktears) to debug some problems that we’re facing with the raster engine on embedded devices. The thing is that the performance was not so good as it was in 4.5.0 and we’re tracking down where is the regression. Besides that we already tested Qt 4.6 on some hardware that we have here and the performance is much better than 4.5.X (regarding GraphicsView). While we wait Qt cross compiling, I’m also updating the pastebin applet to provide a nice dataengine/service so other plasmoids/applications can take advantage of this.

Until now, it has been a great sprint with lot of work being done on Plasma and on Qt 4.6. It’s awesome how much our speed increases when we are together! 😉

Qt Labs Americas is ready!

The theory behind the code

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I’ll not talk about GCDS on this post: others said everything one could tell about the conference! 🙂 It was really awesome: meeting KDE people is just an awesome experience. It was good also to see more brazilians in the conference (after FISL, the brazilian kde community seems to have started to grow or at least organize more itself) . Ah, during GCDS I joined for the first time the e.V. assembly and it’s really good the feeling that I’m helping the KDE community a little bit more. KDE is all about it’s community and it’s community is great! Well, enough with the sentimental part. Let’s talk about the theory behind the code of plasma-netbook.

Newspaper Activity ready for the presentation

During GCDS I did a presentation about this project, explaining a little bit our ideas and why we had them. I also used the time to definetely fix the name of the project to plasma-netbook (instead of plasma-mid). This was done to reflect the objective of the project. We created the project to avoid the idea of putting a full desktop inside a netbook (using concepts that don’t fit well on the device), and we can’t fall into the same problem trying to have something for MID devices also.

It was good to see the interest of the community around the project and also to see that some vendors are already contacting us to ship their devices with our netbook shell. Great also to see that the Kubuntu team will have a “Kubuntu Netbook Remix” project and if we can deliver in time our stuff, they want to use it on their project.

One thing that is also really important about the project is the fact that we want to create a new user experience on these devices. KDE is not about a specific project anymore, it’s all about the user experience: starting on the desktop shell and going far away on social interaction, media, etc. Thinking about this we want to improve this experience by delivering great features such as the open Social plasmoid, the new wikipedia runner and others that will come with the time. This way, when some random user buys his brand new netbook, running KDE he will enter our world, he’ll start to fell part of something more and that was the strategy that saved a fruit company that makes computers and devices (they create a new experience around their devices). I really hope that the community and also vendors can see the potential that we have in our hands and start helping us on this journey and to believe that it’s possible.

If you want to read the paper that I wrote about this, download it here and also my presentation here. You can also check Marco’s last post about the current status of the project.

During my presentation I announced the Qt Labs America project and I hope to give more news for you really soon….ah, and the talk about Qt layouts (including live demos of anchor layouts and animated layouts) by my fellows Caio and Eduardo was also great. If you couldn’t watch it, stay tuned to the videos that the conference will publish (I hope so 😛 ).

Now I’m really looking forward Tokamak3. I hope I can go but I have a lot of “ifs”. Let’s see what happens next weeks.

New Pastebin feature and change of names…

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Now you can just drop an http URL on the pastebin plasmoid and it’ll give you a tiny url 🙂 Nice and small feature…

Also I just committed the change of name from plasma-mid to plasma-netbook to avoid problems, confusions and all questions regarding mid devices that are not the focus right now.

Later I’ll post more news about GCDS and about my presentation/paper.

Netbook: Search and Launch

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The last week I started playing with SAL: the “Search and Launch” containment for the netbook project. It was really nice as I played with Runners and could finally understand some bits that were still inside a black box for me. It’s sooo easy to use Runners on your applications!

So, the main idea behind this containment is that instead of using a regular menu like Kickoff you would be able to just search for what you’re looking for. The regular desktop already uses this feature inside KRunner but just advanced users and a few beginners know about it and how to use it properly (besides the fact that it’s trivial to use) – it’s hidden and is only triggered by a shortcut or by the menu entry “Run Command” that is not so visible.

Right now, as you can see in the screenshot below (sorry, no videos as I need to recompile some stuff to make recordMyDesktop work again) I put an edit line widget to type the queries but later this will be inside the panel. The user just types whatever he wants to do: it can be the name of an application, category (web browser), contact, calculation, unit conversion, etc.. (we’re thinking of a way to teach the user everything he is able to query – but suggestions are welcome).

Search and Launch Containment

There is also the “Favourites Strip”. When you mouse hover one of the results you’re able to add it to the Favourite Strip clicking on the “star icon”. Add as much favourites as you want and you can scroll between them in a “carousel” like widget. Maybe in the future we can make it more beautiful with Kinetic and add some bling 🙂 Right now I want something that really works and we can add blings later (using Kinetic – and yes we may use animated layouts too \o/ hehe). Ah, and I really wished that we already had anchor layouts while developing SAL. It would be so easy and I would not have a lot of problems that I had to layout the widgets =/.

Now I need to make it persistent (so we are able to restore the favourites) and also remove the edit line widget and put in the panel as it was planed first.

Cheers,

Vacations, netbooks and…anchors ?

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Vacations are great (and probably nobody will disagree on that, right ? 😛 ). It’s a time when you can relax, think about your life, check your health (doctor, dentist, etc..), set new work goals, evaluate the old ones and also visit your family: I’m spending all the time at my girlfriend’s house and that’s awesome!

However this vacation is special because I can also work on KDE a little bit more than usual, giving GSoC students a little bit more of attention, bug fixing here and there, triaging bugs and working on our new baby project “Plasma for Netbooks”. Aaron already talked a little bit about this and we have been discussing this a lot through mailing list and IRC. Right now we have a pretty solid plan and some code in playground. Marco did a great job with one of the containments and already has a screenshot for that (come on Marco! I’ll let you have the pleasure on this one hehe).

Basically we’ll have a new desktop shell that is lighter than current’s plasma-desktop and we’ll provide two basic containments: newspaper layout and SAL (Search and Launch – I keep writing search and locate for some reason all the time =P). These two containments reflects the ideas that we have to solve some problems and to bring innovation. As soon as we have more code for that I’ll post details about this ideas (maybe Marco or Aaron will do that also :P). In the end I think we’ll end up with a very nice solution that will make users happier and also more productive while using their notebooks (besides the fact of being much more beautiful thanks to our artwork team hehe).

The last three days I spent time working on my paper for Akademy and I’ll post it as a serie of posts in this blog after it’s reviewed by some native english speakers :). This paper talks mainly about the research I did regarding “desktop-shell” solutions out there for netbooks. However no more spoiler here =P. Anyway if the paper get approved you can read it at Akademy and you can also check my talk about this subject and even see some real live demos. I hope vendors see all the potential around this and don’t make silly moves like this one. With all the features and bug fixing around 4.3 and 4.4 I really see a possibility of KDE coming to a larger audience in the next years…

Before Akademy I’ll attend FISL (unfortunately my paper was not approved) and meet old good friends there. Brazilian KDE community will be there with the Live Blue guys and the other brazilian guys that always have posts in planet KDE 😛 .

News from work (yes, I still read my e-mail while on vacations hehe): as Qt is in the public repository now we are able to release the code we have been working the last months: animated layouts and also anchor layouts! Animated layouts needs some fixing to reflect some new API on Qt but it’ll come just after anchors. Some co-workers should post about anchor layouts and as soon as they post I’ll tell you ;)…Qt is going to rock even more with all this new layout stuff! Please, don’t forget to check this presentation during Akademy to learn more !

I'm going!