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KDE Plasma Active: the Mobile Interface That Works
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."
It is the Kommunist Desktop Environment, so naturally it is superior to the alternatives!
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Who is this guy and why should I care what he nobody thinks?
Looking at the video it has some interesting concepts to make it more usable on touch devices, but to some point they still rely in rather small buttons that are hard to touch.
It also seems very slow but it might be a debug version.
The wall-o-text of TFA doesn't even have pics, and I barely noticed the link to the project
Plasma Active
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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.
On a desktop is Metro. You can get Metro if you install or upgrade your desktop computer to Windows 8. The price to upgrade right now is very low. Why stick with Windows 7 when it can't do what Windows 8 can?
Also, you can play video games on Windows. You can't do that on Linux or OS X. Windows does what they CAN'T. Be smart. Buy Windows 8 today.
If you aren't using Windows, you might as well be eating feces and ghost peppers.
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!
Which this is. KDE Plasma Active is not the same as the default desktop KDE. It uses the same libraries and corer, but is a different interface. I don't see a problem with this at all.
And in other news someone else said their favourite colour is red.
Nobody uses them anymore.
This is the post-tablet era, everyone is moving back to laptops.
> mobile-inspired interface on a workstation.
D-U-M-B.
Why not put a kitchen stove interface on a car ?
Imbeciles.
WHO PAID YOU TO SAY THAT? Also, if you come away from this with anything, it would be never trust a website that still plugs User Friendly. Every couple years I go back to that strip to see if it ever became funny. Never fails to disappoint.
What about Enlightenment? Post from yesterday, TFA says it can work on mobile too.
What is this? radio? just show us some pictures of it and let us come to our own conclusions instead of telling us what we should think lol.
Found your problem right there.
You don't like a mobile OS because it doesn't suite your workstation? lol
"... version 3.0, remains the only mobile-inspired interface he can tolerate on a workstation.""
There's your problem. Don't use a mobile inspired interface on a workstation. Use a workstation inspired interface on a workstation.
Right tool for the right job.
Exactly. These modern-day GUI designers need to read up on "gorilla arm". It's been a well-known phenomena for decades. In their lust to ignore the past (because anything "old" is dumb and shit), they'll eventuallu have to relearn all these lessons while their elders say "I told ya so".
From the summary:
"remains the only mobile-inspired interface he can tolerate on a workstation."
How would that statement even make sense if you are correct?
I watched the video at http://plasma-active.org/#prettyPhoto/0/ and it's not very different then Android (ICS) and its resizable widgets. If I'm wrong, please, point me the differences, or why KDE (which I'm a big fan) on mobile is so better than current alternatives.
my bedpost 04 my
because you can enable plasma active on KDE on your desktop PC if you want.
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.
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.
stretch....
Exactly! Keep up the good work! ( and maybe, if you haven't already started, try getting it to run on a nexus 7/10).
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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.
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WebOS has an elegant interface that in terms of UI/UX puts Android (even Jelly Bean) to shame. Its problems were two-fold: 1) underpowered hardware that didn't showcase the software stack effectively; and 2) lack of developer courtship from Palm and later HP. Hopefully the open-sourcing will rectify these points. In comparison to WebOS and iOS, Android is the ugly, freckly ginger stepchild. I think people willingly overlook its flaws because of the relatively decent hardware it tends to run on.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
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.
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.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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 problems sorted, it will be a nice option and probably a lot closer to "working well" than Unity.
-- sebas
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?
I read the article, I watched the demo video from the website. Still not convinced he really knows what he's talking about. I for one don't want my touch-based interface married to a kb/m based interface to create some hybrid interface. I want a sleek kb/m ui that doesn't distract, and I want my touch-based device ui's to present content to me quickly, naturally, and contextually. The more buttons/tabs/windows/widgets I have to touch to get to my content, the worse I feel the UI is. I'm for simplicity with underlying complexity, not complexity with underlying simplicity.
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.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."