KDE Releases Plasma Active Two

jrepin writes with a snippet from the release announcement of Plasma Active Two: "Mobile devices that adapt to who you are, reflecting what you are doing when you are doing it. This concept is at the heart of the Plasma Active user experience. Plasma Active One was released in October 2011, providing early adopters the first opportunity to experience Activities on a tablet. Since then, the design and development team behind this open source touch interface has been hard at work on an update. ... information about real-world usage enabled the team to improve the end-user experience significantly over the past two months."

Comments

Curious

[Anonymous Coward]

What tablets are people running this on? I'd like to try it out; I don't have a tablet right now though.

Re:Curious

[GeniusDex]

Most developers seem to be running this from a WeTab, so that would probably the tablet of choice. There is about a dozen devices which are able to run Plasma Active quite decently though; they can be found by a small search through their website.

Re:Curious

[dcherryholmes]

This is a good start:

http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Installation

Clippy

[tepples]

From the article:

Plasma Active Two has one significant new feature Recommendations. Plasma Active is now able to learn as you use your device. It uses that information to make recommendations as to what content, web sites and applications are likely to be related to what you are doing right now. This technology uses the power of the "semantic desktop" efforts from KDE Nepomuk to make your device a more valuable adviser and helper. Future releases will build on predictive power as well as the breadth of recommendations. All of this happens right on your own device. Out of respect for your privacy, no data is sent through the network. And no active Internet connection is required for it to work. This brand new technology is not available on any other mobile device.

So that's where Clippy went off to.

Where KDE should have been 5 years ago

[undeadbill]

The screenshots from the site are beautiful. I really like how they are *finally* taking focus on performance for lower end systems, and I hope it translates to better performance on lower end laptops as well.

But I also wish they had taken this focus more than 5 years ago. It would have made a huge difference for me, and other people who have since migrated away from KDE because of performance issues.

Re:Where KDE should have been 5 years ago

[AvitarX]

The work with the OpenGL when they started working towards a target of OpenGL-ES really made it great IMO.

That was pre-work for the tabletty stuff.

Re:Where KDE should have been 5 years ago

[Grishnakh]

I'm just guessing here, but I'll bet that KDE has resource limitations that prevent them from getting things done faster; in short, they don't have enough active contributors. This is an open-source project, after all, but more than that, it's in competition with several other projects (Gnome, Unity, and several other DEs), so they only get a fraction of the total number of people willing to do open-source DE development. Worse than that, they haven't gotten the corporate support that Gnome has gotten, for some odd reason; Gnome has gotten corporate support (as in developers paid to work on Gnome by their employers) from Sun and Red Hat for probably a decade now, and maybe Canonical too (Unity still runs on Gnome, just with a different top layer). KDE got some support from SUSE, but that's about it, and I'm not sure how much of that is still left since SUSE abandoned their KDE-only stance some time ago, around the time they acquired Ximian and hired that moron Miguel to integrate Mono.

If KDE had gotten more corporate support for the past decade, it'd be in much better shape and much farther along than it is now. That 4.0 debacle, for instance, would have been much shorter and less painful if they had had more developers to throw at the problem. Frankly, it's amazing they've accomplished what they have, with the resources they have. This whole story should be a warning about the dangers of fragmentation in open-source software; there's only so many resources to go around, so if you don't get enough resources together, and/or have too much fragmentation from competing projects, they'll all become irrelevant as users abandon the whole thing and go back to proprietary solutions.

Gnome and Canonical devs; take note:

[thisnamestoolong]

This is the right way to make a tablet UI; keep the desktop UI, and create an entirely new one for touch screens. The methods of input are so different that there is no silver bullet cure for unifying the two interfaces. The way users interact with and use such devices is fundamentally different, and the workflow for one is UNUSABLE on the other. Ever try using Windows 7 with a touchscreen? It's an absolute nightmare. Why would anyone think that it would work better in the other direction?

Re:Gnome and Canonical devs; take note:

[unixisc]

I fully agree! KDE left their desktop as is, and only applied their new design concepts to the tablet, where the pre-existing installed base was zero, and it made most sense. Looking @ it, it looks like it could do a good job giving any challenger to Android or iOS a run for their money, should anyone want a tablet platform w/ a differentiating but competitive interface. There is no way I'd have used such an interface for my desktop, but I can certainly see myself using it on a tablet.

Only suggestion to KDE - for a tablet interface, try giving those apps generic names like Music Player or OCR instead of Bangarang or Okular - don't let devs (w/ their knack for cute names) totally confuse your customers as to what the apps do. Similarly, try and lose the K before some of the apps, such as KSnapshot - at least for this, so that it looks less KDE centric and more user centric.

Re:Gnome and Canonical devs; take note:

[Carewolf]

Only suggestion to KDE - for a tablet interface, try giving those apps generic names like Music Player or OCR instead of Bangarang or Okular.

Your suggestion is default, and like everything in KDE the name presented to the user is fully customizable, not just per application but desktop wide.

Posted from: "Web Browser (Konqueror)"

Re:Pinch to zoom?

[GameboyRMH]

Probably patents. A lot of companies are using screw-zoom to work around it. Thanks Apple! Nobody would have MINORITY REPORT thought of that if not for your brilliant innovation!

Re:First post

[Dog-Cow]

The AC GP to this post is right. You're a paranoid freak who reads what isn't there.

Re:Pinch to zoom?

[vizZzion]

In the MeeGo and Mer images, pinch-to-zoom works for the image viewer, the webbrowser, and other Plasma apps that implement this gesture. It's just not shown in the video.