What's new in Plasma Active?
We've been busy bees in the growing Plasma Active team, so it's time to post some progress updates. In case you forgot, Plasma Active is a KDE project to create a desirable user experience for the device spectrum, with its first focus to create a system suitable for tablet computers. In my first post about Plasma Active, you can see the basic shell running on a 10 inch Viewsonic Viewtab. In this post, I'm using a Wetab to demo the current state of Plasma Active. The Wetab is one of our test devices. It's a nice target device since it's Intel Atom-based, which makes building Plasma Active a bit easier, and thus shortens our development-testing-deployment cycles considerable. The Wetab can currently be gotten from German Ebay for 219€ + shipping, so it's also quite affordable.
Back to the software, though. Our focus in the past weeks has been two-fold, we've done a lot of "small fixes" which greatly improve the user experience. The other class of changes is less visible at this point, but still fun and exciting.
New Activity Switcher in Plasma Active
Video Link...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I2_e0Env5Y&feature=player_embedded
Virtual Keyboard Layout
The virtual keyboard is using a layout that is more suitable for tablet computers, containing more characters on the first, easily reachable "page" of it. This makes text input a lot less annoying (let's face it, touchscreens are not ideal for typing as they lack haptic feedback, so it can only become so good). There's still a bunch of things that would make the keyboard better, and of course it has its fair share of bugs, but it basically works and isn't too annoying, either.
Top Panel and Window Switching...
http://vizzzion.org/blog/2011/05/whats-new-in-plasma-active/
- Activity Switcher in Plasma Active
- What's new in Plasma Active? « vizZzion.org :: sebas' blog
- YouTube - New Activity Switcher in Plasma Active
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