[Arm-netbook] EOMA - Open Specification?

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday, May 25, 2014 13:20:34 Troy Benjegerdes wrote:cation,
> derived from http://q3u.be/patent/q3ube/ ) run the Plasma Active software?
> 
> Can this software be adapted to have a functional interface when using an
> HDMI tv as the display? 

Yes.

> Or does it require a touchscreen?

No.

Plasma Active is currently layered thusly:

* base Linux OS; this can be most anything that meets a fairly small # of 
requirements; we've focused most recently on MerOS, but have been successful 
with SUSE, Debian and [K]Ubuntu as well. This part is device generic and one 
reason we focused on MerOS is that it is very well suited to small hardware. 
(Jolla uses it in their Sailfish phone ...)

* Plasma framework (which pulls in select parts of KDE libraries and Qt); as 
with the base OS this is also generic. It provides an application environment, 
components and means to compose them into full products.

* The device shell: this part is device specific.

In the Plasma 4.x line, each device needs its own shell to be written using 
the Plasma framework. They tend to be quite similar, however, and are the 
lesser amount of work by far. It took ~2 weeks to have a phone UI POC, one 6 
month dev cycle to have a shipping netbook UI and ~9 months to develop the 
tablet UI. None of those projects had more than a handful of people on them.

Plasma Desktop is also built on this same infrastructure, though is a bigger 
project on its own.

In the next version based on Qt 5, the need for a separate shell goes away. 
The shell has been genericized and merged into the Plasma framework itself. 
All one provides is a QML package with the device-specific customizations. 
What's *very* cool is that due to this design improvement, the desktop shell 
UI can be changed *at runtime*, so plugging a tablet into a TV could have it 
shift to a media center UI (e.g. http://www.sinny.in/pmc1.3beta) replacing the 
tablet UI entirely. when uplugged it could revert to tablet. (ditto for any 
device form factor combinations...) Canonical refers to this as "device 
convergence" and is something we first showed as a real possibility 4-5 years 
ago when we shipped the netbook UX alongside the desktop one.

All of this (both 4.x and 5.x) work with keyboard/mouse, touch or a 
combination of the two.

There is are active mailing lists (plasma-devel at kde.org and active at kde.org) 
and the #plasma channel on irc.freenode.net if you want to explore these 
concepts further

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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