Mart

a cute little home a cute little boy a cute little cow: mooo!

Tale of a little pixel

a cute little girl

Progress on the netbook ui

A while since last blog, so it seems nice to give some updates on the progress on the Plasma netbook shell, since in the past weeks i did some visual changes.

Netbook newspaper

Now the widgets in the newspaper activity shows their background, to achieve more opacity (and readability), and the scroll area have a neat shadow effect to make the clipped edges to look better. The widget in the newspaper containment now should also keep their aspect ratio in a better way.

Netbook newspaper

Also the search and launch interface has some fixes in its layout, and when no query is entered in the search field it spots some icons that do default queries, like all programs of a given category, all contacts and all bookmarks.

To maximize the space given to applications in those tiny screen resolutions now the panel is auto-hide, with the same sliding animation present in the main plasma desktop autohide panels (from KDE 4.4 done by my first Kwin effect, yay :D)

Here comes the usual video (the flickering of the panel is just a problem of the screencast), in the usual YouTube or OGG-o-vision, enjoy :D



Me

Could someone help me? just bought an ACER AOD250 but I am unable to see the bottom of the screen/windows. So I can't press OK or Agree in some windows, tried to do so with TAB without seeing anything but doesn't work for all things.. Suggestions?

Sent from Mandy (Anonimous) on 20/10/2009 at 15:03:38


Grandezza Icone

Mart, ma almeno questa GUI mi permetterà di avere un cestino gigante e una icona di netscape anche questa bella grossa sul desktop? :D

Sent from Davide Inglima - limaCAT (Anonimous) on 16/08/2009 at 15:54:07


Thanks

> better if plasma-desktop has been killed before



Thanks

Sent from Anonymous (Anonimous) on 14/08/2009 at 0:09:36


Re:starting

> I managed to install plasma-netbook, but I don't know how to start it. Can you give me a hint?

just run plasma-netbook ;)

(better if plasma-desktop has been killed before)

Sent from Marco Martin (mart) on 08/08/2009 at 17:22:57


Starting plasma-netbook

I managed to install plasma-netbook, but I don't know how to start it. Can you give me a hint?

Sent from Anonymous (Anonimous) on 06/08/2009 at 16:41:12


Panel auto-hide vs Menubar

Just two lines to say that I like the overall flow of this GUI (the newspaper layout, what a find!).



There's a caveat with the panel auto-hide, though. I cringe everytime I see it covering and hiding the application's menu bar. This is extremely error-prone, as the user intent at aiming to the panel vs aiming to the menu is expressed with a difference of just a few pixels in both cases. This means you'll have the interface doing the wrong thing 50% of the time.



Also the autohide seems to be triggered by throwing the pointer outside the window. This simply won't work when using a device with a stylus (such as the Nokia N800/N810).



A much better approach to autohide would be that used by the Fennec browser (see video):

http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/firefox-mobile-concept-video/



The panel lies "outside" the visible area of the screen, and revealing it displaces the whole screen down. This way you have both the panel and the menu visible, without compromising screen space. Also you can reveal the panel without having to thrown the cursor outside the screen, by dragging around the background. Plus you can have hidden panels at the four screen edges.



The only problem I see with this approach is discoverability, but that's also true of the auto-hide version.



(Are these messages correctly submited? This is the third time I try to post.)

Sent from TuringTest (Anonimous) on 06/08/2009 at 15:49:56


Panel auto-hide vs Menubar

Just two lines to say that I like the overall flow of this GUI (the newspaper layout, what a find!).



There's a caveat with the panel auto-hide, though. I cringe everytime I see it covering and hiding the application's menu bar. This is extremely error-prone, as the user intent at aiming to the panel vs aiming to the menu is expressed with a difference of just a few pixels in both cases. This means you'll have the interface doing the wrong thing 50% of the time.



Also the autohide seems to be triggered by throwing the pointer outside the window. This simply won't work when using a device with a stylus (such as the Nokia N800/N810).



A much better approach to autohide would be that used by the Fennec browser (see video):

http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/firefox-mobile-concept-video/



The panel lies "outside" the visible area of the screen, and revealing it displaces the whole screen down. This way you have both the panel and the menu visible, without compromising screen space. Also you can reveal the panel without having to thrown the cursor outside the screen, by dragging around the background. Plus you can have hidden panels at the four screen edges.



The only problem I see with this approach is discoverability, but that's also true of the auto-hide version.

Sent from TuringTest (Anonimous) on 06/08/2009 at 15:48:56


Re:

to all one impatient of trying it: i'm not aware of precompiled packages, what you can do is to download and build from svn at svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/base/plasma/netbook

and follow the instructions on techbase.kde.org on how build stuff from svn (it needs kde from svn too, or at least fairly recent snapshots)



about autohide, widget positions etc: everything is really experimental and subject to change, even the desktop showing in alt+tab is an experiment, making it no more a background but something that can be chosen and used

Sent from Marco MArtin (mart) on 04/08/2009 at 19:58:49


openSUSE snapshots

I usually run the openSUSE weekly snapshot builds on KDE 4.3. Can I grab this containment with those builds, or do I have to build from SVN myself?



My mother has a netbook running KDE 4.3 SVN and I thought this would be great for her to try out.

Sent from T. J. Brumfield (Anonimous) on 04/08/2009 at 19:28:02


Icon size

My reasoning is quite simple. There is not so much space. However there is fairly large icons... Look and feel necessity? But in this case why the icons inside the panel are so tiny??? I hate large icon, or rather I love them, only few minutes during the discovery process. Then, I 'd like to use an icon as a logo not as an art design that needs to be large so that the hours spend on it are visible (anyway thanks to contributors).

Sent from FabriceV (Anonimous) on 04/08/2009 at 19:22:56


How to compile

same here on arch =)

Sent from QUASAR (Anonimous) on 04/08/2009 at 18:51:08


Close button

I really hope that the "close window button" isn't at its final place... A close button must be in the upper right corner, or introduce a new way to close an app (right click on the thumbnails in the "exposé"-like view ? Throwing windows out of sight like the Palm Pre cards ? Etc...) but please, not this little cross in the middle of nowhere !



And please, find an other thing to represent a scrolling area. Elevators is so old school !

Sent from Strash (Anonimous) on 04/08/2009 at 18:37:52


scrollbar in newspaper

How does it look with the scrollbar of the newspaper activity put in between the two columns of the newspaper?



In my opinion would be cooler to put it in the middle because it would have a two useful consequences: a "separate columns" function and in that position it would be clearer for the user the fact that the scrollbar controls both columns.



Anyway this project is uber cool!!! Thanks for the good work :-)



Sent from plc (Anonimous) on 04/08/2009 at 16:41:18


does it act like a desktop yet

Last I used it, plasma-netbook showed up on alt-tab. You'd just need to tweak the WM flags I think, unless it was some weird issue only I had.

Sent from Ian Monroe (Anonimous) on 04/08/2009 at 16:09:42


Hmm...

i really am not sure about that auto-hiding panel... It makes it seem like something is broken - i know it maximises the amount of screen realestate, but it's the same look you get if kwin crashes - with the panel always shown it looks like a clever integration of panel and windeco :)

Sent from Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen (Anonimous) on 04/08/2009 at 15:59:06


How to compile

Could you please explain how to compile and install the netbook ui from SVN? I'm currently running KDE 4.3.62 (KDE 4.4 >= 20090728) on Gentoo via the kde-testing overlay but there are no packages for the netbook ui.



Thanks!

Sent from Anonymous (Anonimous) on 04/08/2009 at 15:49:34


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