KDE Plasma Active: the Mobile Interface That Works 70
jrepin writes "Bruce Byfield is not a fan of interfaces for mobile devices. At best, he finds them clumsy makeshifts, tolerable only because nothing better is available. The only exception is KDE's Plasma Active, which not only works well on tablets, but, with its recently released version 3.0, remains the only mobile-inspired interface he can tolerate on a workstation."
Re:Who is he? (Score:5, Insightful)
You should not care in any way who he is. But instead of making stupid, uninsightful comments on Slashdot, you should go read what he wrote and see if it make sense.
Believing something because of the reputation of the speaker is stupid, faith-based magickal thinking. Get over it.
These statements not approved by the SlashThink hive mind.
Re:Who is he? (Score:5, Funny)
Because this one is featured on Slashdot, so has clearly passed through the site's stringent editorial checks for quality and veracity.
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If you dislike every single mobile OS, then you clearly have quite specialised tastes and needs, so what you think is a good interface will probably not be of any use to the rest of us.
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Looks interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
It also seems very slow but it might be a debug version.
At least link to the Plasma Active page (Score:5, Informative)
The wall-o-text of TFA doesn't even have pics, and I barely noticed the link to the project
Plasma Active [plasma-active.org]
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Yeah, link to the Plasma Active page to remind me that the Seamonkey project obviously hasn't gotten Mozilla's latest rendering engine, since in Seamonkey, the Plasma Active page lays out like something a dog threw up. Thanks for designing to fall back gracefully on browsers that don't support whatever bleeding-edge features you're using, guys. ;) /actual captcha word: disgust
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The plasma.active.org homepage renders fine for me in Seamonkey 2.3.3. The only noticeable difference between it and Firefox 15.0.1 or Chrome 22.0.1229.94m on Windows is that it displays with a sans-serif font instead of a serif font. Are you looking at something other than the homepage, or did they maybe fix it after your post?
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I meant to mention that I'm running Seamonkey on Linux.
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My bad - turned out they're using some scripting for layout, and I had NoScript active. So NoScript was what made everything end up piled on top of each other.
Thanks, by the way, for the reply, which goaded me into actually investigating!
I switched to Chrome (which also offers multiple-profile support) anyway... ;)
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You're welcome.
two input paradigms, same interface, same mistake (Score:3, Insightful)
Can we please quit trying to make a superstar common interface that works with both touchscreens and keyboard/mouse?
The result is always bad interfaces for one or both. There is no way around this, except to have two different interfaces.
Re:two input paradigms, same interface, same mista (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:two input paradigms, same interface, same mista (Score:5, Informative)
Bruce (the author of the article) tried running it on a desktop system to see what it would be like there. It is not the intended use of the interface, but Bruce was curious and tried it out.
However, we still have a separate desktop UX that, as Shinmera mentioned, shares the same core and libraries but which has a significantly different interaction pattern tailored for the mouse/keyboard/lots of apps method of using a general purpose device (e.g. a full laptop). Plasma Desktop will continue to be supported, developed and recommended for desktop systems (as the name implies) while Plasma Active is aimed at mobile and "appliance" style devices.
Cheers, aseigo.
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Exactly! Keep up the good work! ( and maybe, if you haven't already started, try getting it to run on a nexus 7/10).
no contradiction (Score:2)
What's the contradiction? KDE has more than one interface, and the author likes the mobile interface enough that he can stand it on the desktop. However, the mobile interface wasn't intended for use on the desktop; it isn't normally used on the desktop; and you don't have to agree with the author.
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From an app dev's point of view, are they different? I don't really understand the levels of abstraction involved here, since I've only done stuff like Java that deals with it itself, or console apps.
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There aren't any modern-day GUI designers. They've been pushed into the wilderness by the UX creators. These have oversized body piercings, smoke coloured cigarettes and if you ask them about Fitts' Law they think it's a 1970s cop show.
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Both Plasma Active and to some degree, Android are modal. It's the same user interface with different contextual modes for input. Plasma does this much better from what I've seen.
Doing it exclusively poorly (such as in W8) is much more of a Microsoft innovation than it's endemic to the concept.
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Wow! I never saw it that way before!
I'm totally sold. Which box do I deposit my soul into for payment?
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False dichotomy.
Why can't I use Windows, AND eat feces and ghost peppers?
BTW, I think your post should have gotten a "+1, Funny"
Long-time KDE user (Score:2, Interesting)
Lately I've been trying to find how I can get one of the available tablets to run KDE. After going through all the disruption of the early KDE 4 releases, I'm glad to see things settle out and be usable. For the whole time I've been hearing about Windows 8 and its "do things the same way on the desktop and the laptop", I've been thinking of how well KDE has managed NOT to screw this up--and be in the game much earlier than Microsoft. Now I'm ready to try KDE Plasma Active on a tablet!
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The Nexus 7 can now run Ubuntu ... has anyone tried installing anything other than the default desktop?
Plasma Active on Nexus7 (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, a few people have, in the last days, installed Plasma Active packages (based off of Kubuntu) onto it, see this photo: https://yfrog.com/esup2ioj
It's much better suited, input wise, than the Unity shell, which, for example, heavily relies on right mouse button actions, and also scrolling seems mostly broken. (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Nexus7/KnownIssues for a more detailed list). The input problems are being fixed just by the Plasma Active shell and apps, so if they get all the driver-level proble
Tablets (Score:2, Funny)
Nobody uses them anymore.
This is the post-tablet era, everyone is moving back to laptops.
Re:The sheer stupidity of modern GUI developers (Score:4, Interesting)
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They call those RVs.
Its the messages not the comic (Score:2)
You do know that for the last few years Illiad has not actually posted a new comic on a day to day basis?
but the funny may not be what you GET as such.
E? (Score:2)
What about Enlightenment? Post from yesterday, TFA says it can work on mobile too.
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It would have to. E17 is the widget set specified in Tizen, and its development is heavily funded by Samsung.
An article about a GUI with no pictures (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really different then ICS (video link) (Score:1)
Re:Not really different then ICS (video link) (Score:4, Informative)
The design is completely different from ICS. Yes, there are resizable widgets on both, but that's where the similarities end.
Instead of a highly modal menu based system, Plasma Active provides an always-available "peek and launch" area by dragging down the top panel which lets you see all your running applications as well as launch new ones. There is an emphasis on avoiding the modal menu labyrinth that pretty much defines the Android interface. This works more or less on phones, but really falls down on other sorts of devices.
At the center of Plasma Active are activities, which lets you switch your device quickly from being focused on, say, a work or school project to planning a social event. There was a recent email on the devel list from a user who uses activities when travelling, for instance; it lets him keep maps, notes, documents and people relevant to the trip together in one place and with a flick of the finger he can switch to this very focused set of information.
ICS makes a tablet a great application launcher and occasional widget viewer. Plasma Active makes a tablet a reflection of your interests and activities.
Try it and you'll quickly see what it is capable of ...
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Is this vastly different to virtual desktops (which BTW I find extremely useful to the extent that when I use an OS without them it makes me cry)?
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Tablet video, no desktop video (Score:2)
This really doesn't demonstrate using the same interface transparently across a desktop and a tablet.
Unless it's one of those vertically mounted tablets that normally comes with an attached keyboard and mouse (i.e. a touchscreen PC or laptop), it's really pretty uninteresting as far as the tablet video information goes.
Please provide a video of doing exactly the same things on a standard (non-touchscreen) desktop using a mouse.
WebOS came damn close (Score:3)
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yeah i checked out the WebOS source code: there's no phone application, and no infrastructure for supporting phone modems, so you cannot even write a phone app because there's no libraries to call through to the hardware. they're "working on" replacing the bluetooth stack - it's like... huh? they've gone back to square one. the whole point of this eco-system is to bring a *solution* to the table, not *part* of a solution that would take 10 man-years for the free software community to make use of it! tha
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Where is this supported? (Score:2)
What tablets currently support this? I might be willing to give it a shot on the Nexus 10 if it works, and if it's possible to back up the configuration beforehand and restore to factory if I don't like it. Linux is generally terrible at font rendering, but a high-DPI display like on the Nexus 10 might help circumvent this.
Do web browsers under Plasma Active support the same kind of pinch-to-zoom features that are standard on portable devices?
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It seems you're happy to put up with two different GUIs on two different devices. So am I.
However it seems that Microsoft, in trying to make Windows 8 be the one true GUI of doom to rule them all, have decided that people can't cope with this at all. So either we're odd or there's some other reason. Perhaps an attempt to cut down on development costs?