New open source projects have been launched by KDE developers aimed at bringing a consistent user interface across a varied of touch screen interfaces like tablets and entertainment devices and take data integration to a new level. The new Plasma Active and Contour projects were developed to offer a new user experience for tablets, smartphones and set top boxes.
Now if only they’d make a suitable browser for it.
Why do they have to make a browser for it? Installing a third party browser is a matter of a few clicks. Opera is a very good browser. Also, Konqueror now with webkit is a good browser. I think they should focus on the core, and let the others to work on components that run on top of it.
Third party browsers never integrate with KDE.
Konqueror is not much of a Web Browser it’s way better suited as a File Manager. Why would a browser need a ‘up’ button?
Also, Opera sucks. I don’t care if you can customize it not to suck because I’m not much of a customizer.
If you don’t like the up button, you can easily remove it. If that’s your biggest complaint. Mine is that it doesn’t quite work as well with some sites, even with webkit. Not really sure why.
It’s just an example of how it’s not really designed as a Web Browser.
Couldn’t similar things be said about Internet/Windows Explorer?
So the project that was forked by Apple to create a web their own web browser … was not designed to be a web browser?
There is a difference between not being designed for something, and simply not being very good at something. Sometimes they are correlated, sometimes not. If A hammer breaks while trying to pound in a nail, you don’t point at the nail remover on the other side and claim it wasn’t designed to be a hammer.
You’re talking about the back-end. I’m talking about the User Interface. It clearly fares better as a File Manager.
Its a kde app, it can be configured to look however you want. The up button is removable ( in five clicks of the mouse ) . Is there anything else that you would remove or change to its interface so that it would be more “designed to be a web browser” and less “designed to be a file manager” ?
Sort of reminds me how a 3.5 mm audio male/male plug in the ipod/iphone secion costs $16.00, but in the general av section its $5.00.
I’d make it look more seamless and sleek looking. Do something to make the search and address boxes seem less like add-on/widgets and more integrated. Maybe deviate from the system menu a bit.
And, this is another important issue, they should definitely update it more often. It hardly seems like that care about it. Which is a shame because it’s the single most important application on any platform.
Ok, I wouldn’t have thought those things you listed would merit a web browser’s design. So I understand, but disagree with you.
I think I like it the way it is. I like the fact that it looks like every other kde application, and uses standard qt controls.
I do agree they could do a better job of updating the back end. Maybe now with webkit in tow they’ll do that.
You could try Rekonq, a pure WebKit replacement for Konqueror. It’s more Chrome-like, but with tabs under the address bar, and a real KDE app.
Yeah, that’s more like it. I still think it could use work but it’s clearly meant to be a Web Browser.
The simple explanation is perhaps because of all the crappy websites, or simply the basic nature of the linked web. In any case the up button is a great usability feature, and it’s rather puzzling other browsers do not copy it.
It’s the feature i miss the most when using other browsers. Obviously I can get to the front-page of any site by selecting and deleting everything but the base URL in the address-bar, but two quick taps on the up button is both much easier and faster.
I’m being negative, I know, but did they test this thing with real users, or is it just some developer’s dream vision? This UI looks finicky, it’s got tons of hidden control points (e.g. flicking with a small gesture outside of the primary icon area, slow dragging from an invisible area on the right side of the screen, dragging an arrow-shaped thingy to the left to open groups) and confusing multiple ways of representing things (cover-flow/stack view vs. icon group window view thingy). Very skeptical…. Sorry.
Invisible? Isn’t there a handle? I actually think a not-so-intrusive handle is a good design on small form factor touch screens.
Isn’t this kinda norm these days? Look at how many “confusing” ways any reasonable file manager has.
Plus this project is in its infancy. Yet it shows interesting possibilities with the current KDE plasma framework.
Most KDE apps use MVC, so it is possible to create new views for most of them without major refactor. The future of Linux is on mobile (Android alone apparently…) so laying some work to be able to survive at some point in the future seem to be a good idea. Its like knowing an asteroid is coming to earth and just waiting until you can see it without a telescope to act. I don’t think Plasma will gain that much traction on mobile until there is an Android UI based on it, but still good to know that they think about it right now.
Maybe true, but most if not all are not battery friendly and thats an important aspect for mobile devices.
Its why we have powertop and valgrind
Yes, but if there’s no one with at least little knowledge on user research among developers, it will only be “a developer’s dream”, failing to be actually useful, like Plasma on Desktop is and Gnome Shell probably will be
Edited 2011-04-14 02:08 UTC
How could the future of Linux be on mobile while there’s currently only few open mobile devices to install it on, and mostly through hacks that won’t work with the next generation of each handset ?
An android that’s not rooted is not much better than iOS as far as openness is concerned. I wouldn’t expect major system modifications like the installation of KDE to work without root access…
Untrue. With Android, you don’t need root to install apps from other vendors, you can duplicate core functionality, and you can make modified versions of existing apps, etc. Having said that, I don’t think anyone has bothered with porting KDE to Android so far, and I don’t see much point in it.
KDE have solid and many other abstraction framework to do just that (using system calls without applications having to care about them). So, no, its not about hack, the KDE4 design support it.
We’re in the prototype phase currently. This means we’re open to feedback and contributions from real users, UX specialists, other developers and OSNews commenters. The final UI will likely look nothing like what we currently have.
Just to reassure everybody on this: we have actual user interaction designers doing actual user testing working on the project
so, I expect the UI of this first prototype to be significantly different in the first actual release
Consistent interface… hmmm… this looks like the same “KDE SC Kit” rebranding crap…
Another flaw I see is that they are just a buntch of Qt experts, not Linux expert (no, is not the same by far).
When Google started Android one of the first things it did was to hire real Linux experts like Rover Love (a former Novell employee, http://rlove.org/).
But all I see in this project are a bunch of Qt experts not even usability folks.
There a lot of challenges in implementeing a Tablet experience, like installation of software, security, etc.
So I wonder, who is going to implement this part of the Tablet experience?, They will say “Hey, here is the Shell, you do the rest”, if that is the case then I don’t find it quite attractive.
Another problem is the schedule, they won’t be able to do mutch in so litle time.
I personally don’t think these project will take off or get enought (if any), sponsors, Not when Android is around.
OKOKOK.
This blogspost answer some of my questions:
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/04/plasma-active-operating-systems….
I don’t believe in touchscreen for real daily computer work. I’ll just leave it to the ATMs…