Re: Closing this list

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Thursday 06 August 2015 14:05:20 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As the Plasma Mobile project supercedes Plasma Active, I'd like to close
> this list to avoid fragmentation.
> 
> At the same time, I'd like to invite those that lurk here, and that haven't
> seen activity in a while to join the general Plasma mailinglist, and have an
> eye on the newly created Plasma Mobile forums at
> https://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=293
> 
> See you on the flipside!

Hi sebas,
since we still occasionally receive emails here with questions about Plasma 
Active, please make sure that any of our websites that currently point to this 
list (which I guess is plasma-active.org plus some Wiki pages) are changed 
appropriately.
Thanks,.
Thomas

___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 350333] Plasma5 crashes when returning from hibernate (blank-screen)

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=350333

Thomas Pfeiffer  changed:

   What|Removed |Added

 CC||colo...@autistici.org

--- Comment #2 from Thomas Pfeiffer  ---
Active is only for Plasma Active, the tablet version of Plasma. Your bug should
go into the product plasmashell. Also please provide the version of the
plasma-desktop package.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are on the CC list for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: How to Activate Plasma Active on Hybrid

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Monday 25 May 2015 13:50:53 Ahmad Ishtiaque wrote:
> Dear Support Team,
> 
> I have a hybrid HP Ultrabook (one with a detachable keyboard). Recently I
> have installed Netrunner 16 which comes with KDE 5 as its primary DE. So I
> was wondering how to toggle between KDE Desktop mode and Active mode. Could
> you please help?
> 
> Regards

Hi Ahmad,
sorry for letting you wait so long for a reply.
And also sorry for not being able to give you good news: Plasma Active has not 
been ported to Plasma 5 yet, so you'll have to wait until that has happened. 
When there is a Plasma 5 Active (or whatever we'll call it), it is planned ot 
be easily switchable (e.g. as soon as you detach the keyboard).
Best,
Thomas
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 318231] Some icons are not shown, only text

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318231

--- Comment #3 from Thomas Pfeiffer  ---
(In reply to Marc Pawlowsky from comment #2)
> I have seen this using Fedora 21 and 2.15.1 

Versio 2.15.1 of exactly which package?

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 340645] facebook contact/google contact_aliases

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=340645

Thomas Pfeiffer  changed:

   What|Removed |Added

 CC||colo...@autistici.org
 Resolution|--- |WAITINGFORINFO
 Status|UNCONFIRMED |NEEDSINFO

--- Comment #1 from Thomas Pfeiffer  ---
Could you please elaborate more? Full sentences in a bug description are more
helpful for us than just some context-less words.
And are you sure this concerns Plasma Active?

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are on the CC list for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Plasma Active - Ultrabook touchscreen

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Thursday 09 October 2014 15:51:19 Caio Ferreira wrote:
> Hello gents,

> I just bought a Lenovo Ideapad Flex 14 Touch-80C4000EBR, which came with
> windows 8.1. I'm a linux user since 2002, currently using openSUSE 13.2
> (beta) but I was relly exited to see Plasma Active running in this
> touchscreen ultrabook.
> 
> I've seen a lot of things about plasma active running in some tablets, but
> nothing about touchscreen notebook. I'm just sending this message because I
> can see a big "market" on touchscreen notebooks as no other linux DE works
> properly with touchscreen.
 
> Why not to create a distro with plasma active? (suse studio is a great tool
> for this purpose) (yes, there is a old one:
> https://susestudio.com/a/abQj83/plasma-active#discussion)
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Caio Ferreira

Hi Caio,
(btw, why are you so sure there are no ladies in the Plasma Active team? ;) )
You are right, convertible laptop/tablets such as the Ideapad Flex are indeed 
a prime target for Plasma - though not for Plasma Active alone, but for the 
combination of Plasma Desktop in the laptop mode and Plasma Active in the 
tablet mode.
Plasma Active was explicitly designed for pure touchscreen use, so it's what 
should be used in tablet mode when the keyboard and touchpad are hidden.

Being able to seamlessly switch between the different shells when the device 
mode is changed has always been the goal of Plasma. However, in the Plasma 4 
times, this didn't work smoothly yet.
This will change with Plasma 5, though. The thing is that the port of Plasma 
Active to Plasma 5 is not finished yet. As soon as it's done, it should work 
in any distribution that ships Plasma, so it makes most sense to pick it up at 
that point.

Another reason why we don't see widespread adoption of Plasma Active in 
regular Linux distributions yet might be that it was developed based on the 
mobile-focused Mer platform and packaging it in other distributions turned out 
not to be trivial. This will change with the Plasma 5 version, too, since at 
that point Plasma Active is just a regular shell package like Plasma Desktop.

So, tl;dr : If you want the optimal experience with Plasma on your 
convertible, either wait for the port to Plasma 5 or help make it happen 
faster by contributing code / money / whatever to its development ;)

Best,
Thomas


___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: PA 4 update release?

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Saturday 15 February 2014 20:02:37 Wolfgang Romey wrote:
> Am Samstag, 15. Februar 2014, 18:27:13 schrieb Marco Martin:
> > On Saturday 25 January 2014, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > > hi...
> > > 
> > > there were some changes in kde-workspace in 4.11 that breaks the build
> > > of
> > > plasma-mobile. yet another person came into #active on irc tonight
> > > stumped
> > > by this. plasma-mobile’s master branch does build, however.
> > > 
> > > i’d like to propose that we do an interim PA4 release based on what is
> > > in
> > > master right now so that it builds against 4.11
> > > 
> > > the packages being delivered on the most recent MerOS that sports Plasma
> > > Desktop and SDDM have a build from master iirc, anyways?
> > > 
> > > Marco, what do you think?
> > 
> > I invite people trying:
> > http://makeplaylive.com/~notmart/plasma-active-i586-latest-devel-20140215.
> > is o
> > 
> > it's built from devel
> > 
> > if it doesn't have any particular problems (as in, regressions from pa4)
> > 
> > i'll move those packages to testing, then eventually to stable (with
> > release iso and all)

Are there any improvements compared to the last stable image? Bugs fixed, 
performance improvements, new features? If there are, could you point them out 
so we can test them? If not, then what is the point of a new release?

> I have installed it in virtualbox and until now found only one bug:
> 
> marble is crashing.

When I tried to start Marble in live boot, the whole system crashed (the X 
Server died and wouldn't come back). This is reproducible.

> Maybe there are problems with the mediaplayer. It starts when i click a
> media file in files, but there is no sound or image.

Playing video and music worked fine on my Wetab.

There is a new launcher "Help", which tries to start KDE Help Center but that 
crashes. Is that supposed to be there anyway?

Flipping through pages in Okular Active does not work anymore unless one zooms 
in or out first.

These were all the issues I could find, but I think all of them have to be 
fixed 
before releasing it (for Marble, a possible workaround would be to not install 
it if all else fails).

Cheers,
Thomas
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Files - Follders and Tags

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Thursday 31 October 2013 21:10:12 Wolfgang Romey wrote:
> I think folder and tagging are far from ready in KDE.
> 
>  I have a lot of images i tag intensely in digikam. When i sync them to my
> weTab via owncloud, i have tag them anew. That is not acceptable. As long as
> tags are not tied to a file, tagging is not ready.

Tying tags to files would be difficult (if not impossible at least for some 
file types), but we definitely need better Nepomuk synchronization in order 
for tags to really take off in a multi-device(+cloud) world.
 
> When I copy files to my weTab, i should be aksed, if I want to tag them. If
> yes, my tags should be offered and I should be able to create new one.
> The same should happen, when i load down content from bodega.

Yes, that was the original idea we had for the file copying process, but that 
somehow got lost in the development process (probably due to limited 
development resources, a.k.a Marco didn't have enough time left to do it). 
It's definitely something that should be implemented in Files: Copying and 
tagging should happen in one go.
 
> One tag should allways be the folder in which the file rests, so i can see
> which files are in a folder and can tag them. When i tag them with another
> folder, the old tag folder would removed

Yes, that's kind of what I imagined.
 
> As long as tagging is far from ready, PA should offer fallback lines. One
> fallback for me is dolhin, allthough it is not touch optimized.
> 
> Wolfgang

Personally, I'm not a big fan of fallbacks (since they make it less likely 
that the underlying problem will be fixed), I'd rather push for tags to get to 
a point where they can become the main way to organize your resources but 
still coexist peacefully with a (hidden) folder hierarchy.

As long as tags are (seen as) inferior to organizing files in a folder 
hierarchy, they just won't see widespread adoption, which to me is a lost 
opportunity.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Files-Folders-owncloud-PA5

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Wednesday 30 October 2013 21:30:24 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> On Wednesday, October 30, 2013 20:29:48 Kevin Krammer wrote:
> > On Tuesday, 2013-10-29, 23:47:43, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> > > That struck me as well. I've tried to fix it some time ago, but it
> > > really
> > > is not that easy technically. The synching library and owncloud itself
> > > is
> > > folder- based, changing that would need very intrusive changes to the
> > > system. I'm not in a position to do that.
> > 
> > Couldn't it work with something like:
> > - creating a temp dir
> > - symlinking or hardlinking the respective files into it
> > - sync
> > - delete links
> > - copy remaining files (new in sync)
> > - remove empty temp dir
> 
> Possibly, but would I feel really dirty about doing it? Certainly yes.
> 
> The nice thing about the sync process is that it's event-driven, you add a
> file in one of the synched locations, sync starts shortly after that. No
> polling for the local filesystem.
> 
> Also, the other way round isn't addressed by it.
> 
> If you (or anyone else) want to give it a try, be my guest... :)

As mentioned in my reply to Aaron in the "Categories" thread: We need to find 
a solution to make the folder and tag worlds compatible anyway, in order to be 
ready for the future when users seamlessly switch between the different Plasma 
shells.
This won't be easy, but we need something, because people won't give up folder 
hierarchies in the Desktop world anyway.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Categories

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Wednesday 30 October 2013 19:52:53 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > And what is the advantage of this?
> 
> a) there is no disadvantage
> b) if you switch from Active to Desktop, it matters

When switching between Active and Desktop, our whole "let's hide the folder 
hierarchy" idea breaks down anyway: People want to organize their files in 
folders on the Desktop and they might not even tag them, so they won't want 
files to just throw everything you e.g. copy from a USB stick into ~/ and they 
want to find files via the folder hierarchy in Active as well.
We'll have to re-think the whole concept for Plasma2, since it only worked as 
long as PA is the only thing you used on a given device.

Probably we'll have to link tags and folders somehow (like sorting files into 
folders automatically based on their tags, and assigning tags automatically 
based on parent folder, for example)

> c) it helps prevent Add Ons from clobbering data you put on disk just
> because you happened to name something “Alice In Wonderland.epub” and then
> went to download the book (in the master branch, Add Ons will refuse to
> overwrite it and give you an error message)

How will Files distinguish the two files, unless at least one of them has a 
tag or files will distinguish them based on some other meta data?
 
> > However, if the same type of file is sometimes obtained via Add Ons and
> > sometimes copied onto the device using Files, they end up in different
> > folders, and the only way for users to move them to the same folder is by
> > using Konsole or installing Dolphin.
> 
> if the user doesn’t see this, what does it matter?

You have a point there ;)
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Categories

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Wednesday 30 October 2013 16:24:08 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Sunday, October 27, 2013 15:38:08 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> > On Sunday 27 October 2013 14:06:34 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > > The best answer to this is to have a generic asset handler that simply
> > > downloads files into ~/Downloads, or whatever the most appropriate
> > > folder
> > > is depending on the mimetype.
> > 
> > In Plasma Active, all things should go straight to ~/ since we don't do
> > folder hierarchy ;)
> 
> books go into ~/Books.
> 
> there is a difference between “we don’t present the file hierarchy to the
> user in the relevant file UI” and “there is no file hierarchy on disk"

And what is the advantage of this? If a certain type of file is only obtained 
via Add Ons, it may make sense to put them in a dedicated folder. However, if 
the same type of file is sometimes obtained via Add Ons and sometimes copied 
onto the device using Files, they end up in different folders, and the only 
way for users to move them to the same folder is by using Konsole or 
installing Dolphin.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Categories

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Sunday 27 October 2013 14:06:34 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> The best answer to this is to have a generic asset handler that simply
> downloads files into ~/Downloads, or whatever the most appropriate folder is
> depending on the mimetype.

In Plasma Active, all things should go straight to ~/ since we don't do folder 
hierarchy ;)
If we start using a folder hierarchy for downloaded stuff, it becomes 
inconsistent with Files' behavior of just putting everything in ~/
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 326639] Installing ownCloud client through Add Ons does not work

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326639

Thomas Pfeiffer  changed:

   What|Removed |Added

 Status|UNCONFIRMED |RESOLVED
 Resolution|--- |FIXED

--- Comment #4 from Thomas Pfeiffer  ---
Yes, that did the trick! It installed correctly!

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 326639] Installing ownCloud client through Add Ons does not work

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326639

--- Comment #2 from Thomas Pfeiffer  ---
The error message is gone, but now I get an "undefined" progress bar which just
keeps moving left and right but nothing else happens

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 326639] New: Installing ownCloud client through Add Ons does not work

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326639

Bug ID: 326639
   Summary: Installing ownCloud client through Add Ons does not
work
Classification: Unclassified
   Product: Active
   Version: PA 4
  Platform: unspecified
OS: Linux
Status: UNCONFIRMED
  Severity: major
  Priority: NOR
 Component: Applications
  Assignee: active@kde.org
  Reporter: colo...@autistici.org

When I try to install the ownCloud client on PA 4 through Add Ons, I the error
"Install error failed to parse the descriptor file". Then Download is greyed
out but the application is not installed.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start Add Ons
2. Select Apps -> Productivity -> ownCloud client
3. Tap "Download"
Actual Results:  
Error "Install error failed to parse the descriptor file"

Expected Results:  
Application installs

Plasma Active 4 release image with updates form today

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 324464] Add-Ons don't slide to the left when an item is selected from the right-most vertical list

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324464

Thomas Pfeiffer  changed:

   What|Removed |Added

   Priority|NOR |HI
 Status|UNCONFIRMED |CONFIRMED
 CC||colo...@autistici.org
 Ever confirmed|0   |1

--- Comment #1 from Thomas Pfeiffer  ---
I can conform this. This could really be a problem especially for new users
since the only way to find out that the details of the selected item are hidden
off to the right is to try swiping the columns. New users may not even be aware
that this is possible, because when selecting items in the other columns, they
scroll automatically so swiping isn't needed.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[bodega] [Bug 326615] Actions of icons are unclear in list. Add mouse-hover tip

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326615

Thomas Pfeiffer  changed:

   What|Removed |Added

 Status|UNCONFIRMED |CONFIRMED
 Ever confirmed|0   |1

--- Comment #1 from Thomas Pfeiffer  ---
I've reported the problem informally as well. According to Aaron this is a
problem with Sencha, the UI framework used. Let's hope it can be fixed.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are on the CC list for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Using Bodega

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Thursday 24 October 2013 17:06:24 Wolfgang Romey wrote:
> Would itnot be good to have something like partipants manual in which are
> tasks descriped in detail like:
> 
> You want to become a participant of makeliveplay bodega?
> At first you have to get an account.
> Go to url and enter your email-address and a password. You will get a
> confirming email and can now log in with your email and password.
> If yo are using Plasma Active, start addons and proceed as described above.
> 
> 
> You want to get digital content.
> Go to url and log in with your account. You see ... where you can search or
> browse.
> 
> 
> You have digital content, you want provide for free or for sale.
> Go to url and log in with your account
> 
> 
> And so on until
> 
> You want to install your own warehouse on your own server e.g as a school.
> ...
> 
> 
> Is something like that planned? If not, if the idea is apprecieated, would
> like to start with something like that.
> 
> Wolfgang

Great idea!
Since Sascha Manns wrote the PA Handbook, maybe you should talk to him as 
well, he might be of help.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Experiences during Bodega partner experience walkthrough

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Tuesday 22 October 2013 21:55:53 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Tuesday, October 22, 2013 16:38:17 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> > On Tuesday 22 October 2013 13:47:27 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > > > When sending a request for publishing for an image, there is still the
> > > > message, that an icon is missing. There is only the possibility to
> > > > upload
> > > > a
> > > > sreenshot, which i did, but which is not accepted as an icon.
> > > 
> > > Turning screenshots into icons is not implemented; you need to provide
> > > an
> > > icon.
> > 
> > Auto-creating icons from thumbnails was what Marco suggested in a previous
> > thread, wasn't it (see below)?
> 
> yes; but it only got implemented tonight (thanks to marco)

Lightning-fast Marco, as always :)

> > > b) modify the server in such when icons are generated, if none present,
> > > use
> > > the screenshot and resize it icon-sized
> > 
> > Is it still the plan to implement that in the future? For me, this is the
> > way to go, because what works better as an icon for an image than a small
> > version of it?
> 
> yep. and for things like books we even know which screenshot to use (the
> front cover).
> 
> many will still want to create their own custom icons, though, as generally
> the result will usually be better.

Sure. People should have the chance to provide their own icon, with auto-
generated ones as fallback. 
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Experiences during Bodega partner experience walkthrough

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Tuesday 22 October 2013 13:47:27 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > When sending a request for publishing for an image, there is still the
> > message, that an icon is missing. There is only the possibility to upload
> > a
> > sreenshot, which i did, but which is not accepted as an icon.
> 
> Turning screenshots into icons is not implemented; you need to provide an
> icon.

Auto-creating icons from thumbnails was what Marco suggested in a previous 
thread, wasn't it (see below)?

> b) modify the server in such when icons are generated, if none present, use
> the screenshot and resize it icon-sized

Is it still the plan to implement that in the future? For me, this is the way 
to go, because what works better as an icon for an image than a small version 
of it?
If that will be implemented in the future, I think it can be worked around be 
users creating an icon from a scaled-down version of the image themselves. It 
would just be more convenient if the server did it automagically.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Experiences during Bodega partner experience walkthrough

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Monday 21 October 2013 17:40:05 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > Single Asset form:
> > - What if I use an open source licence not contained in the license list?
> > Plus, for works like books or music, I don't think "proprietary" is
> > commonly used. Maybe use "Proprietary / All rights reserved" as a more
> > generic term?

> agreed; fixed.

It still says "Proprietary" only, for any type.

> > - A Drag & Drop feature for single files would be nice here as well, that
> > old "Browse" dialog feels a bit old-fashioned once you see how well D&D
> > works in Mass create
> 
> oh no, we’ve spoiled you! but, yes, i agree. i’ve added a bug report for it.

> > - Clicking "Create" without selecting a type does nothing except marking
> > the field with a very thin red frame which one might miss. There should
> > be a message in the vein of "Please fill in all required fields" in
> > addition to the marking
> 
> agreed. br created.
> 
> > - After selecting type "image" and uploading a PNG, I get the
> > "Unrecognized
> > assetType" error as well.
> 
> should be fixed.

The "Unrecognized assetType" error is gone, but now I get "Error in sending 
your request. Missing required tag: undefined" What does that mean?
 
> > - The type "image" appears twice in the list, but I get the error with
> > both
> > types
> 
> Yes, resolved that duplication as well ...

Yup, it's gone.

Good to know we agree on all the points I mentioned :)
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Experiences during Bodega partner experience walkthrough

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Sunday 20 October 2013 14:42:46 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Sunday, October 20, 2013 13:19:10 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> > - I wasn't sure if I could use my make.play.live user account as
> > participant account as well, so I just went ahead and created a
> > participant account with the same data as my user account. This resulted
> > in the following message: "A new Make·Play·Live account has been created
> > for you!"
> > And below in red "AccountExists". So which one is it? Has it been created
> > or does it already exist?
> 
> fixed

Now I get the correct message (though a more descriptive error message would 
surely be useful in the future ;) ), so the bug as such is fixed.

> > - The login page asks for a user name, but I don't have one, so I used the
> > email address associated with my account and that worked. Seems like the
> > input hint on the field is just incorrect.
> 
> fixed.

Confirmed as fixed.

> > - The partner list has three unlabeled action icons on the right which do
> > not have a tooltip (title tag)
> 
> seems to be a bug in sencha; the tooltips are being set :/

Either a bug or a weird API. I think I remember setting tooltips correctly in 
Sencha being rather non-intuitive, but that might just be constructive recall 
(or whatever the English term for that is) on my side, not sure.
I see the tooltips neither in Firefox nor in Rekonq.

> > - The Terms of Service page:
> i’ve addressed these items.
> 
> > More will come as soon as I am accepted as Publisher.
> 
> I received the notification email of the request and approved it a little
> bit earlier :)

Thanks! Here goes:

- Mass create: Cool feature, but I couldn't get it to work. 
 - Drag & Drop worked (all files appeared in the list below the box). Yay!
 - Clicking the green tickmark simply removes a file from the list. I don't 
know exactly what I'd expect from clicking that tickmark, but this is 
definitely not it ;)
 - Clicking "Review the new assets" just takes me back to the Assets page 
which is still empty. I might have created a dozen entries in some database 
now or I might not, I cannot tell

- When I entered some data in the "Single Asset" form, clicked on "Mass 
create" and then back on "Single Asset", the form was empty. Not a huge deal 
because people probably only make that mistake once, but for improved error 
tolerance, at least a warning that by navigating away you lose your 
unsubmitted input would be nice

Single Asset form:
- What if I use an open source licence not contained in the license list? 
Plus, for works like books or music, I don't think "proprietary" is commonly 
used. Maybe use "Proprietary / All rights reserved" as a more generic term?

- A Drag & Drop feature for single files would be nice here as well, that old 
"Browse" dialog feels a bit old-fashioned once you see how well D&D works in 
Mass create
- Clicking "Create" without selecting a type does nothing except marking the 
field with a very thin red frame which one might miss. There should be a 
message in the vein of "Please fill in all required fields" in addition to the 
marking
- After selecting type "image" and uploading a PNG, I get the "Unrecognized 
assetType" error as well.
- The type "image" appears twice in the list, but I get the error with both 
types

Cheers,
Thomas
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Experiences during Bodega partner experience walkthrough

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

Hi everyone,
I just walked through the experience of becoming a Bodega Partner/Participant. 
Here is what I noticed (good or bad, in chronological order) until the point 
where I have to be accepted as a Publisher:

- I wasn't sure if I could use my make.play.live user account as participant 
account as well, so I just went ahead and created a participant account with 
the same data as my user account. This resulted in the following message:
"A new Make·Play·Live account has been created for you!"
And below in red "AccountExists". So which one is it? Has it been created or 
does it already exist?

- The login page asks for a user name, but I don't have one, so I used the 
email address associated with my account and that worked. Seems like the input 
hint on the field is just incorrect.

- The partner list has three unlabeled action icons on the right which do not 
have a tooltip (title tag)

- The Terms of Service page: 
 - When hovering anywhere over the page, the cursor turns into the link cursor 
but when I click, nothing happens
 - the second bullet in the "Definitions" list is empty
 - "You agree to not upload content, create store," should be "Stores" or "a 
Store"
 - I liked the "That wasn't too bad, was it?". It gives the dull task of 
reading ToS a little more humane
 - "The Warehouse commits to exclusively use software distributed under a Free 
software license as defined by the Debian Free Software Guidelines in the 
operation of the Warehouse. This includes the content server software and the 
applications the Warehouse hosts or distributes which are used to access the 
content system." Even though it clearly only relates to the software used to 
manage and access stuff, when I read it less carefully the first time, it 
looked to me like the Warehouse would only _host_ Free software as well. 
Therefore even though legally everything is fine, it might be a good idea to 
add that proprietary software may be hosted in the Warehouse as assets in 
order not to scare away people who wish to put proprietary software into their 
stores. On the other hand, maybe scaring away proprietary software people is a 
good thing? ;)
- creating stores -> creating Stores
- The ToS are amazingly short for something involving hosting and even selling 
content! I wonder why other stores have ToS several times as long as this just 
for accessing content or providing user-generated content without any payment 
involved. Unless it turns out at some point that you missed some crucial 
legalese which bites you in the ass later on, these ToS should be the role 
model for ToS for any digital store!

This is of course only friendly feedback since I am not in any way responsible 
for Bodega, so do with it as you please ;)

More will come as soon as I am accepted as Publisher.

Cheers,
Thomas



___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Bodega server availability for creating assets

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Sunday 20 October 2013 11:46:38 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Sunday, October 20, 2013 03:27:57 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> > On Saturday 19 October 2013 16:32:21 Wolfgang Romey wrote:
> > > Is there a need for wallpapers, to have icons ( or thumbnails)? Would it
> > > not be easier, when the server would be modified in a way, that it does
> > > not expect an icon,
> > 
> > We need something to display in the list alongside the name, and to me it
> > makes sense especially for wallpapers since for them, thumbnails are much
> > more useful for users than names in a list.
> 
> this is true for many other kinds of assets, too (books, e.g.)
> 
> other content stores similarly require an icon to be generated or provided,
> so it’s quite normal.

Sure. I just meant to emphasize that for wallpapers they are even more useful 
- I'd say probably even necessary - than for other kinds. For a book it's an 
additional cue to ease visual scanning and it makes the list look much nicer, 
but if you know what book you're looking for, you can identify it by its name 
as well. Wallpapers, on the other hand, are rarely (if ever) known by name.

For some assets (e.g. books or music) we may even actually face the situation 
where people don't have anything they can use for an icon (not every book or 
every music track has a cover designed, especially for people just starting 
out to produce something). Therefore while uploading an icon for those assets 
should definitely be encouraged, it might be useful to have a fallback icon so 
that we don't prevent assets from being uploaded on the basis of a missing 
icon, which imho would be a bit discriminating. It would just be sad if a 
useful feature like icons would turn into a barrier for participation.

For those kinds of assets (like PDFs or videos) where automatic thumbnail 
generators already exist, for optimal convenience for Partners, the server 
could auto-generate an icon in case they don't provide one. This is not a 
must-have feature, but certainly a nice one to have (of course the usefulness 
of icon-sized thumbnails is in many cases limited compared to author-provided 
icons, but it would still be better than nothing).
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Bodega server availability for creating assets

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Saturday 19 October 2013 16:32:21 Wolfgang Romey wrote:
> Is there a need for wallpapers, to have icons ( or thumbnails)? Would it not
> be easier, when the server would be modified in a way, that it does not
> expect an icon,

We need something to display in the list alongside the name, and to me it 
makes sense especially for wallpapers since for them, thumbnails are much more 
useful for users than names in a list.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Bodega server availability for creating assets

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Saturday 19 October 2013 15:15:57 Marco Martin wrote:
> On Saturday 19 October 2013, Wolfgang Romey wrote:
> > > Yep; you can grab, for instance, any image and upload it as a wallpaper.
> > 
> > I tried to upload a wallpaper, which mostly worked. But when I send the
> > request for publishing, i get:
> > 
> > "Error in sending your request.
> > The asset needs at least one icon."
> > 
> > I do not see a way to add an icon. There is only the possibility to add a
> > screenshot.
> 
> aah, right, wallpaper assets don't have fields to upload icons.
> now, we could
> a) modify the client to allow upload icons (looks rather silly tough the
> concept of "icon of a wallpaper")
> 
> b) modify the server in such when icons are generated, if none present, use
> the screenshot and resize it icon-sized

I'd vote for b), precisely because of the argument you mentioned against a).
For the system it might be called "icon", but for the user it's just a 
thumbnail.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Bodega server availability for creating assets

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Saturday 19 October 2013 11:34:02 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> Which makes me realize that all first-accounts on a Partner should probably
> just get *all* roles immediately.

If people can assign those roles to their accounts themselves, there would be 
no security/integrity benefit in not assigning them automatically, so yes, 
this should definitely be done.

I guess I should try out the Partner experience myself to give usability 
feedback soon. I just haven't created anything yet which I could post. Would 
it be possible to use some dummy asset for testing that could just be deleted 
right after the process is completed?

Cheers,
Thomas
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: immediate communication app for Plasma Active

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Saturday 21 September 2013 08:27:42 Carl Symons wrote:
> This morning, I read
> http://snarkmarket.com/2009/3115
> 
> "...instead of talking to our computers, we’re typing on our phones."
> 
> For good reasons, Plasma Active is not a smartphone. Yet given the mobile
> nature of the devices that will use it, there should be some way of making
> immediate connections with other people.
> 
> I don't know what is now available or what people have planned. But
> something like PA-Skype or voice-controlled IRC would be nifty.

Right now we have pretty much nothing, but an SoK student is working on KDE 
Telepathy Active, which will support voice- and video-chat in the end as well 
(not sure if it will already be available in the first release, but Telepathy 
offers the necessary technology).
So something is on the way!
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Say hello and last try to wake somebody up

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Thursday 12 September 2013 22:14:48 Arnd Diestelhorst wrote:
> > , because
> > right now all that's in there are Project Gutenberg books and KDE
> > wallpapers.
> 
> I just found that out. My expectation was, to find additional software
> there, because I didn't see any other obvious way.

Add Ons will be the central source for software as soon as it's ready, which 
will be soon.
 
> So, how can one install other software?

 You can use zypper (zypper se to search, zypper in to install).
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Say hello and last try to wake somebody up

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Thursday 12 September 2013 21:12:58 Arnd Diestelhorst wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> my name is Arnd Diestelhorst, living in Munich, Germany. I am a happy long
> term user of KDE and also owner of a WeTab. So it would be very nice for me
> to have Plasma Active on the WeTab.
> 
> I've been long waiting for this release and now want to try it out.
> Unfortunately I can only try what's on the ISO since the registration
> process for the bodega server simply does not work. It gets stuck at the
> step, where I have to confirm my email address by an http link to
> addons.makeplaylive.com on port 3443. I have opened a bug report [Bug
> 324754] with a wireshark log showing, that this server doesn't accept http
> requests on that port. It immediately closes the connection.
> 
> Usually when someone releases new software, he is very keen to attract new
> users. Therefore I have marked this bug report as critical, but nothing
> happens for days.

I am not part of the bodega team, but I assume that there was no reaction to 
your bug report because the bodega team is currently hard at work to get the 
system ready for people to put content into the store, because right now all 
that's in there are Project Gutenberg books and KDE wallpapers. 

> Now I just found the reason: The email says
> 
> > To start using your Make·Play·Live account please confirm your email
> > address by clicking on the following link:
> > 
> > http://addons.makeplaylive.com:3443/.
> 
> Change this to https and it works!

Great, that should indeed be easy to fix!
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 324768] Youtube does not work

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324768

Thomas Pfeiffer  changed:

   What|Removed |Added

 CC||colo...@autistici.org

--- Comment #1 from Thomas Pfeiffer  ---
That's probably a codec issue. Afaik Mer ships only Theora and no Flash, so I
suppose we're out of luck there...

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Plasmoid installation in PA

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Saturday 07 September 2013 21:44:56 Bogdan Cristea wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I had a look at new plasmoids installed on PA (Picture Frame). No
> modifications are needed to be installed in PA, but when a plasmoid is
> added to an activity it seems a little strange that the plasmoid
> position and size are somehow limited to some discrete values, i.e. the
> plasmoid cannot be positioned anywhere on the screen and its size cannot
> vary to any value. 

That's on purpose: The Activity Screen uses a layout grid, and everything 
automatically aligns to that grid. That limits the placement and sizing 
freedom a bit, but in combination with the resource boxes and the imprecision 
of touchscreen interaction, Activity screens would turn into a real visual 
mess pretty fast if there was not grid.
Btw: I've heard that Plasma 2 uses a grid layout for all workspaces (not sure 
if that's still true, though).

> One more question. Where could I add the new plasmoids I find to work on
> PA (e.g. picture frame) ?

There is no offical way yet, but as soon as it's completely rolled out, 
Plasmoids will be made available through Add Ons. See also Aaron's Google Plus 
post sharing the release announcement
(https://plus.google.com/10740696571114069/posts/ffJp9rpTMZe):
"The real story, however, is going to be in the months after this release as 
we roll out the content store management app for people who would like to 
participate by offering original content (apps, artwork, books, etc, etc.), an 
app developer support program and focus on hardware adaptations."

Cheers,
Thomas

___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: PA on Nexus S

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Friday 06 September 2013 17:14:22 Daniel Kreuter wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> sure why not. All you need to do is to follow the hardware adaption [1] but
> this is no easy task.

Yes, this will probably be the hardest part.

> Currently it's not known how good PA will run on a smartphone, but someone
> needs to do the first step in this area.

Well, I expect it to basically work, but many details to not work well (e.g. 
the Add Items dialog won't be of much use if squeezed into a tiny smartphone 
screen). And we don't have any phone stack, of course, so your smartphone will 
basically be turned into a small, 3G-enabled tablet (3G basically does work, 
though, thanks to ModemManager).

If you find out that you like PA, though, you can then proceed to start 
creating an optimized version of PA for smartphones. Technology-wise it should 
be fairly easy to do since our UIs are very flexible, so it's mainly a matter 
of creative UI design.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Installing PA (mer) on Nexus 7

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 05.09.2013 18:58, Matthias Raives wrote:

I dont recall anyone saying this, but thanks for confirming my
suspicions.  Do you guys have an estimate on when PA will be ready for
the 2013 nexus 7?


Answer: When someone made the adaptation. This is a community effort: 
Adaptations happen if someone makes them happen. If you have the skill 
to do it yourself or the money/power/charms to make someone else do it, 
it can happen pretty fast. If not and nobody else has, than it will 
never happen.


___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Feedback to the Dot story

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 05.09.2013 17:05, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:

It's not my call, but it isn't yours, either.


Yes, Thomas, it is my call in this case.

We all provide input, even across boundaries of expertise, but this is not a
democracy. It isn’t a dictatorship, either. It is a participation based
meritocracy within which we have different roles and responsibilities within
the over all effort.

This particular matter is not your responsibility.

Nobody micromanages your usability testing, guideline creation or your work on
bugs.kde.org for PA. People provide input, but you have a very free hand in
these things. Please show others the same consideration.


I'd say it's Carl's call then, isn't it? He asked for input. I gave my 
input (stating why I would not call it polished), you and others 
provides yours, and Carl stated why he considers "polished" to be the 
right word and I assume he will keep it in, which is fine with me 
because you're right, Carl is the marketing person, it's his 
responsibility and he's good at it.



What I’m trying to get across here is that this discussion is bordering on the
absurd, which is why I’d really, really appreciate on both a teammate and a
personal level if you could somehow find a way to just edit this one aspect of
your personal opinion related to release communication.


It may be a bit difficult for me at times to clearly distinguish between 
personal opinion and facts (like the fact that Smart TVs and set-top 
boxes are not touch devices), but I'll try.



To me it's similar with bugs: I may have annoyed you and Marco and
possible others as well when I insisted on several bugs being fixed
before release.


this is not the same thing in the least, and i know that if you think about it
for a moment or two that you’ll know that too.


With regards to release communication, it isn't that's true. I meant 
more of a general "Reminding people that there are still a lot of quirks 
to iron out", but since we're talking about a dot article here, it is 
indeed something different.


___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Plasma Active (4) is awesome, and I know that ;)

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

Hi everyone,
sorry for coming across as being too negative regarding Plasma Active (4).
I know that Plasma Active has loads of great things going for it (why 
would I still work on it if that wasn't the case?), and I want people to 
get excited about it, to spread the word and everything. That's why I 
wrote that article for The Powerbase back then, that's why I happily 
complied with Carl's request for my quotable opinion of PA4.
There are just some words that trigger my "Marketing Speech Alert", and 
one of those is "polished".
When Carl put the word into perspective by adding "relative to PA1", I 
totally agreed. I just hope that users will read it like that as well.


I guess I'm more of a classical "usability" guy than a "user experience 
guy" in the sense that I focus more on reducing frustration and problems 
to a minimum then on creating excitement. That doesn't mean I don't want 
excitement, but for me personally, a product that merely covers up 
problems with excitement would not be a good product.
I know full well that Apple products sell well because people are so 
emotionally attached to them that they simply ignore the practical 
problems they face when using them. That's not something I'd want to do, 
though.


I think both positions are important. We need people who spread the - 
well earned - excitement and push things forward, but we also need 
people to care about limiting frustration and anger.
So I'd say keep on doing what you do so well, guys, and I'll keep doing 
what I do well (perhaps trying to tone down a bit so we do not spend too 
much time arguing), and in the end we'll have a product that is both 
exciting and has few problems.


Looking forward to the release and the public's reactions to it,
Thomas
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: What Plasma Active 4 offers

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 05.09.2013 17:27, Sebastian Kügler wrote:

On Thursday, September 05, 2013 17:07:46 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:

On Thursday, September 5, 2013 16:37:29 Marco Martin wrote:

so reading document formats, local storage, tagging files, advantages of a
client side pim app, playing media files...


groupware (email / calendaring), viewing office documents, reading eBooks
and  PDFs are all very important things to certain key groups. +1 for
listing those items as well as the file management and media items Marco
noted


... and synching the resulting or consumed data things across devices of
different nature. :)


Not just synching: Synching _without_ using a cloud that sits in the 
USA, with built-in NSA backdoor. That's a huge advantage over all major 
competitors.


___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Feedback to the Dot story

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 05.09.2013 13:30, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:

so what do we do? wait until there are only tasks that a majority of random
test subjects do well on?


Do you think the tasks for the test were picked randomly? Most of the 
tasks in the test are essential for working with what sets Plasma Active 
apart from other OSes (like adding things to Activities, tagging stuff 
in Files or using SLC). It's not the first time I set up a usability test.



To me, this is not a "polished product", this is still an (advanced)
early adopter / developer version.


i understand you feel this way (i noted so in my earlier email, even). this is
not your call to make, however.


It's standard procedure in human-centered design to do a usability test 
before releasing a product. And in every company I've worked with, 
people not being able to finish important tasks (or having big problems 
along the way) results in a red light, forcing the product team to do 
another iteration before release.
I know that's not the way it works in FOSS: We release early versions 
into the public to get feedback from a wide range of people. That's 
absolutely okay, but calling it a "polished product" instead of an early 
version still does not make sense to me.
It's not my call, but it isn't yours, either. If the majority of the 
team feels that PA4 is a polished product (which may very well be the 
case), then I have to bow to that majority, of course.



And since we target early adopters
and devs, why do we call it "polished product”?


we target early adopters and devs because there are no devices that it comes
pre-installed on.


Yet I have heard several times things along the lines of "The people we 
target with PA4 will be fine with that", which translates to me as "We 
assume the target audience of this release to have above-average 
computer skills".



real products ship. real products are not perfect. yet somehow people use
them and even fall in love with them.


Release early, release often, I know. That's what all FOSS should do and
most do. But e.g. Simon or KTp give their - already pretty mature -
products 0.X version numbers and say they'll call them 1.0 when they
find nothing really missing anymore (that doesn't mean they cannot be
improved anymore, though).
I know this isn't about version numbers, but I've never heard David call


yes, it is not about version numbers.

that said ... Simon is quite mature; KTp still has a ways to go. regardless,
one of the hurdles KDE projects face is this perfectionism bleeding over into
public communication.


I consider both Simon and KTp pretty successful, despite their making 
clear that they are not "1.0" yet.



we can, and do, have all sorts of valid criticisms of the products produced.

for most people, that doesn’t matter one bit. and so when we go out and tell
people how *bad* our software is (which is exactly what your messaging
translates to in people’s minds) they just don’t use the software at all or if
they do they focus on the negatives we’ve  primed them for.

the result is that they do not use software that would actually work *just
fine* for them and even make them happy.

why? because we’ve pointed out what it does not do well in an attempt to over
our ass instead of highlighting what it does do well and focusing people on
that.


I know this list is publicly readable, but do you think what's written 
on this list directly affects public opinion? Read the quote from me in 
the article. Does this sound like pointing out how bad PA4 is to you?



I don't mean to say that we did bad work, because we didn't. We did
great work, but we still have more great work to do before we have a
"polished product". PA4 is great, but still very "rough" in a whole lot
of ways.


shall i list all the bugs i run into on a daily basis on my (not very old)
Android phone?

shall i share the pain of watching my brother-in-law use his brand new top-of-
the-line Android phone while he complains about this or that as he fiddles
about with it?

you are trying to live in a world of perfection that doesn’t exist, and that
mindset is an existential threat to the  project.


I pointed out why I would not consider PA4 a polished product. I did not 
write a blog post about PA4 being bad or anything.


I have different standards for "polished" than you. That's fine with me, 
but I don't think that means I'll have to shut up and keep my standard 
for myself.
To me it's similar with bugs: I may have annoyed you and Marco and 
possible others as well when I insisted on several bugs being fixed 
before release.
However it turns out that fixing these bugs took only a few days, 
resulting in improved quality. And it was not that bug fixing which 
delayed the release in the end. I gave my green light on august 16th. If 
I'd kept my mouth shut, those bugs would still be in there.

___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Feedback to the Dot story

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 05.09.2013 12:26, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:

On Thursday, September 5, 2013 11:22:42 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:

My suggestion:
"Plasma Active is a user interface from the KDE community intended for
tablets. It can be customized to work on smartphones, settop boxes,
smart TVs, and touch computing devices such as home automation and
in-vehicle infotainment."


almost...

Plasma Active is a user experience technology stack for consumer electronics.
It currently *comes* with a slick user interface for tablets.

Plasma Active is *not* the tablet UX, however.


Agreed, that's the most precise definition.


(it is quite likely, btw, that Plasma Active will be slightly re-jostled with
the Qt5 version of plasma. the tablet UX will use the new unified Plasma shell
and become “just” another Plasma Shell Package. what will likely live on as
Plasma Active is the system integration and application focus ..)


Makes sense.


That way we don't say "It cannot work on those devices", but nobody can
blame us if it doesn't work well as it is, because they'd have to


agreed ...


Notice also that I intentionally did not include smart TVs and settop
boxes in "touch computing devices", because they are not, and probably


who said it would be a touch interface?


Nobody did, not even me. Carl just wrote "touch computing devices such 
as settop boxes, smart TVs" and I corrected that because settop boxes 
and smart TVs are not touch interfaces. That does _not_ mean PA cannot 
be used on them, of course. I just moved the "touch devices such as" 
after settop boxes and smart TVs so that now it says that those are not 
touch devices, but PA still works on them (with a UI optimized for 
remote controls, of course).



Plasma, in general,does not believe in exclusionary input method modalities.
Plasma Active as a whole is focused on consumer electronics; we’ve only
focused on the UX for tablets for a variety of practical reasons.


Of course.


This release is intended to complete the evolution of Plasma Active
to a polished product from its proof of concept first release.


I would not call PA4 a "Polished product" yet. It's still for early
adopters only, ordinary consumers would still hate us for PA4.


i suppose i should go take it away from the ordinary people using it then?
or tell the reviewers that said it was the best tablet UX they’ve used that
they were obviously mistaken?


Reviewers are not ordinary people. I had a group of students run a 
usability test with about 20 other students (mostly mechanical 
engineering). They gave PA below-average ratings on pretty much all 
aspects, stating that they really like the general ideas behind it, but 
find that it lacks in various key areas (not feature-wise, but they way 
they work).
These subjective findings were of course supported by numerous big 
objective problems they faced.
Reviewers appreciate the general idea, which they should. They see where 
we're heading, which they should.
But if you give it to some ordinary consumers (even with an introduction 
of key features, without that they're totally lost and I have data to 
prove that as well) and give them some tasks to complete, they get lost 
and they get disappointed, even though they, too, like the general concept.
To me, this is not a "polished product", this is still an (advanced) 
early adopter / developer version. And since we target early adopters 
and devs, why do we call it "polished product"?



i have given up trying to get you to abandon such abstract perfectionism, but
i’d appreciate it if you’d keep such proclamations out of discussions here.

the software works quite nicely (better than some other options out there
being foisted on “ordinary consumers”) and if we wait for some perfect moment
of wonderment pouring out of baby angel’s eyes, we may as well just delete the
repositories and stop the project right now.

real products ship. real products are not perfect. yet somehow people use them
and even fall in love with them.


Release early, release often, I know. That's what all FOSS should do and 
most do. But e.g. Simon or KTp give their - already pretty mature - 
products 0.X version numbers and say they'll call them 1.0 when they 
find nothing really missing anymore (that doesn't mean they cannot be 
improved anymore, though).
I know this isn't about version numbers, but I've never heard David call 
KTp a "polished product", either (even though I think it's more mature 
right now than PA, which is understandable given that creating an IM 
client based on an existing framework is way easier than creating a 
whole new shell plus all the basic applications).



iOS came without multitasking or a clipboard or system notifications or a
hundred other Really Important Features Every Ordinary Consumer Absolutely
Requires but *somehow* managed to gain the hear

Feedback to the Dot story

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

Hi Carl,
thank you for writing the article!
Here are a few comments:


Plasma Active is a user interface from the KDE community intended
for tablets, smartphones and touch computing devices such as settop
boxes, smart TVs, home automation and in-vehicle infotainment.


Even though this is not factually wrong, I still find it misleading: Our
intention for the future is for PA to be used on all these device
classes. However, PA4 is intended for tablets only. If we write it like
this, people may think PA4 is already intended for everything, will
install it on their e.g. settop box or smart TV and complain that it
works like shit on there (because their TV does not have a touchscreen).
See also my recent blog post on the topic:
http://sessellift.wordpress.com/2013/08/27/you-can-use-it-that-way-but-dont-expect-it-to-work-well/

My suggestion:
"Plasma Active is a user interface from the KDE community intended for
tablets. It can be customized to work on smartphones, settop boxes,
smart TVs, and touch computing devices such as home automation and
in-vehicle infotainment."

That way we don't say "It cannot work on those devices", but nobody can
blame us if it doesn't work well as it is, because they'd have to
customize it (as in pretty much redesigning the UI, but technically it's
not a problem) first.

Notice also that I intentionally did not include smart TVs and settop
boxes in "touch computing devices", because they are not, and probably
will never be. Who wants to stand up form the couch and walk over to the
TV to use touch controls on it? These things are controlled via some
kind of remote interface (even controls via Kinect and such are not
"touch").


This release is intended to complete the evolution of Plasma Active
to a polished product from its proof of concept first release.


I would not call PA4 a "Polished product" yet. It's still for early 
adopters only, ordinary consumers would still hate us for PA4.

The rest of the paragraph is spot-on.


client-side touch-optimized email application


Kontact Touch has been part of PA for a long time and nothing has 
changed about it since then. So it's definitely not new in PA4. Michael 
Bohlender currently develops a new KMail Active UI, but that's not there 
yet.


Other than that, it's a great article!
Cheers,
Thomas

___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Last things for release

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 05.09.2013 06:14, Carl Symons wrote:


There is a bit of confusing information about the basysKom download center.
The latest iso there is from September 1, and some of the links are broke.

Would be good to have some sort of checksum on plasma-active-4-i586.iso as the
instructions suggest using such. If a checksum is created, this information
needs to be added to the wikipage along with the download location.


Ah yes, a checksum would be important to have. People should be able to 
verify that their download went correctly, since even a slight 
incorrectness in an image can cause problems later on which cannot be 
traced back to an incorrect download.

An sha1 checksum should do fine.


* Are all articles/all other things ready to go?


The Dot story is ready...
http://dot.kde.org/2013/09/05/plasma-active-4-ready-when-you-are

Should be reviewed for accuracy of information and any
writing/grammar/spelling screwups


I'll write my feedback in a new thread to avoid bloating this one.


I started writing Tips on the wiki. After a short while, I realized that there
is way too much to do a decent job on a beginning manual. Besides the people
who have installed PA have done pretty well with no manual and an occasional
helping hand.



So it's pretty sparse. Anyone is welcome to add, change and so forth.


Oh actually there already is a "Beginner's FAQ" with quite some useful 
information here:

http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Info/FAQ
Could you please add your stuff to that page? We could then link to it.
In earlier releases we had a bookmark to the FAQ in the Welcome 
Activity, but that seems to have got lost at some point, so we need to 
link to it from the pages people are most likely to visit when they 
install PA.


We have quite a few features which nobody will ever have any chance of 
finding by themselves (e.g. how to create or delete a tag, how to remove 
a file from an Activity, ...), not even tech-savvy people. For those 
things, we absolutely need the FAQ.



I think that we're intending this release to be used by people who aren't the
beginning manual kind of folks.


Not a manual (actually nobody but my dad want to read a manual), but 
short answers to the most frequent questions are a must.



___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: ownCloud in PA4

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Wednesday 04 September 2013 17:17:53 Bogdan Cristea wrote:

> I have installed all owncloud stuff and the client is available only as
> KDE settings module. Should this module be displayed on Apps section ?
> It is visible only when searching for it. Here is a screenshot when I
> start owncloud module.

It makes sense that it is a Settings module: You configure the ownCloud 
synchronization and from then on, everything happens automagically, nothing 
more to do. A settings module is a perfect place for that.
It's unfortunate that it shows up when you search in the Launcher and then 
breaks if you start it that way, but this is not how users are supposed to 
start it anyway, so it's not that much of a problem.

We have to tell users how to install it and where they can find the 
configuration GUI, though, so thank you Carl for putting it into the Wiki and 
announcement.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: PA4 lastest stable image

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Tuesday 03 September 2013 10:22:42 Carl Symons wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 6:20 AM, Bogdan Cristea  wrote:
> > On Tue 03 Sep 2013 03:13:49 PM CEST, Marco Martin wrote:
> >> On Tuesday 03 September 2013, Bogdan Cristea wrote:
> >>> Hi
> >>> 
> >>> Where can I find the latest stable image of PA4 ? I have looked on PA4,
> >>> but I didn't find a link pointing to the latest PA iso.
> >> 
> >> http://makeplaylive.com/~notmart/
> >> 
> >> 
> >> https://share.basyskom.com/plasma-active/deployment/wetab-exopc/tablet/me
> >> r/devel/weekly/> 
> > Thank you for the quick reply. For the PA site admins: these links should
> > be immediately accessible from http://plasma-active.org/, instead of
> > diving into Wiki
> 
> That would work if there were only one device or type of device. There
> are some other things that people might need to consider about PA4
> images. So the wiki is necessary to sort things out.

Agreed: If potential users just got links to all the images with no 
instructions, they'd be completely lost. We might still improve the 
Installation wiki page, but we do need to send people to a page with 
instructions first.

> There is currently a wait to see where the images will be hosted. When
> that's settled, then the wiki can be updated.

Yes.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: PA4 stable issues

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 03.09.2013 16:35, Bogdan Cristea wrote:

Hi

Eventually I have been able to install PA4 stable image
(plasma-active-i586-stable-2013-08-29.iso), the development image
installs but does not boot. It seems to me that there are different
kernel command line arguments.

However, while the general look is clean and stable, I have find the
following issues:

- Active Okular: there is still an issue when changing pages (different
page width)


Yes, that's a rather ugly bug, but wasn't deemed a release blocker. I 
hope somebody will find a fix for it during the next dev cycle.



- Add-Ons: when one selects an item from the right-most list, the view
should automatically scroll to the left in order to show the right-most
panel (which allows to download and view the book)


Indeed it should. I hadn't noticed that bug. Could you file a bug 
report, please? Probably not a release blocker either, though, since you 
can scroll manually.



- owncloud client can be installed, but I was unable to start the
client. Not sure how this client works, but I was expecting to see an
icon on the main panel that allows to display a GUI.


Others reported that they could use the client. Don't know what went 
wrong on your system...



I am also wondering what is the status of the Application Store for PA ?
Are there plans to provide something similar to KDEs Install Widgets
interface from kdeapps.org (and have a PA-dedicated section there) ?


According to Marco, the current Add Ons store should theoretically be 
able to handle applications. That category just has not been introduced 
yet. I feel a bit uneasy that we haven't had the chance to test whether 
it really works before release, but even if it doesn't we can still push 
an update to the stable repos once apps are available server-side.


Cheers,
Thomas

___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

ownCloud in PA4

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 03.09.2013 12:39, Sebastian Kügler wrote:

On Sunday, September 01, 2013 20:40:42 Wolfgang Romey wrote:

Actually we had planned official support for ownCloud sync for PA4, but
time and manpower constraints didn't allow us to do it in time. It's
still on our to do list, though.


What has to be done to support ownCloud sync in PA4?


It has to be put into the announcement. The client is ready and works. :)


It does? Dude why didn't you tell us? :) I thought it was still in a 
"basically works, but there is still work to do" kind of state.
Is it already in the repos? ownCloud for PA is very important, we must 
not miss this is in the announcement!


___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Reinstallation and saving the home directory

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Saturday 31 August 2013 19:26:55 Wolfgang Romey wrote:
> For the first time I preserverd my home-directory when reinstalling the
> newest PA4. It was quite easy: With dolphin i copied the home-directory to
> a sd-card. Then i reinstalled PA4, enabled my wlan-connection and installed
> dolphin. After copying the old home/mer to the new home/mer my old
> activities came up.
> 
> The last thing i had to do was installing owncloud-client. Then the plasmoid
> for syncing worked again. Perfect.

I'ts good to hear that this works well!

> BTW: For me is the possibility to sync from and to PA4 via onncloud an
> important feature, which should be made more public.

Actually we had planned official support for ownCloud sync for PA4, but time 
and 
manpower constraints didn't allow us to do it in time. It's still on our to do 
list, though.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Cursor is not hidden in newest PA4 image

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Saturday 31 August 2013 14:59:18 Marco Martin wrote:
> On Saturday 31 August 2013, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> > I just installed the most recent PA4 image (plasma-active-i586-
> > stable-2013-08-29.iso). When I bootet, I noticed that the cursor is
> > visible. The option "Visible cursor" in settings is set to "off",
> > switching it on and off again does not have any effect.
> > Cheers,
> > Thomas
> 
> can't reproduce on a new installation on an exopc, he mouse is invisible.
> 
> the cursor is the black blocky one or the white antialiased one?
> 
> it's probably an installation not gone well or interrupted before the last
> blocks were copied

You're right, seems to have been an installation problem. I reinstalled from 
the same image and now it works.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Cursor is not hidden in newest PA4 image

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Saturday 31 August 2013 14:59:18 Marco Martin wrote:
> On Saturday 31 August 2013, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> > I just installed the most recent PA4 image (plasma-active-i586-
> > stable-2013-08-29.iso). When I bootet, I noticed that the cursor is
> > visible. The option "Visible cursor" in settings is set to "off",
> > switching it on and off again does not have any effect.
> > Cheers,
> > Thomas
> 
> can't reproduce on a new installation on an exopc, he mouse is invisible.
> 
> the cursor is the black blocky one or the white antialiased one?
> 
> it's probably an installation not gone well or interrupted before the last
> blocks were copied

It's the black blocky one. Will try a reinstall.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Cursor is not hidden in newest PA4 image

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

I just installed the most recent PA4 image (plasma-active-i586-
stable-2013-08-29.iso). When I bootet, I noticed that the cursor is visible. 
The option "Visible cursor" in settings is set to "off", switching it on and 
off 
again does not have any effect.
Cheers,
Thomas
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

User data backup (was: Zypper up on stable PA4 image killed Maliit)

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Friday 30 August 2013 17:30:01 Wolfgang Romey wrote:
> Am Freitag, 30. August 2013, 17:21:35 schrieb Sebastian Kügler:
> > On Friday, August 30, 2013 17:15:29 Wolfgang Romey wrote:
> > > Thank you. I know that. But how about the average user?
> > 
> > Realistically, two questions:
> > 
> > - How much of this "average user" are there?
> 
> Hopefully soon there will be more average users. We have to tell it then and
> should know what to tell them in time.
> 
> > - What's the alternative, not mentioning that data will be lost?
> 
> The alternative could to tell them to install dolphin or install by default
> and tell them to do a backup with it.
> Cheers

Using Dolphin to copy files in hidden folders using a touchscreen is probably 
even less fun than doing it via Konsole with some commands posted somewhere.

I think it's okay to assume that people who installed PA3 have enough 
technical knowledge to follow instructions we give them using Konsole. I'd say 
you, Wolfang, are a good indicator for the technical skill level PA3 users 
have. So if we can come up with instructions you can follow, we should be fine 
;)

I'd recommend that during the PA5 dev cycle we (or someone else) develop a 
touch-friendly backup / restore solution which people can install via Add Ons 
and use for the migration from PA4 to PA5 if that requires a reinstall as wlel 
(or if they need to reinstall for some other reason, or migrate to a new 
device or whatever).
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Zypper up on stable PA4 image killed Maliit

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 30.08.2013 16:03, Sebastian Kügler wrote:

On Thursday, August 29, 2013 23:52:14 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:

True. So we probably should go with Carl's suggestion to explicitly tell
people that migration from PA3 isn't possible and if they've used PA3, they
should reinstall.


Not quite, "upgrading from PA3 is not supported, but might work (or might
not). We recommend a clean installation.". People don't like to hear
"impossible", and it isn't, just that we don't want to debug the mess it
leaves. We should also mention backing up the user data in /home/mer).


I'd leave out the "might work", just say "Upgrading from PA3 is not 
officially supported" or "There is no official upgrading path form PA3 
to PA4". We don't necessarily have to explicitly say "It's impossible", 
but we should not encourage anyone to try it, either. It simply won't 
work, and we want as few angry users as possible.


___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Zypper up on stable PA4 image killed Maliit

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Thursday 29 August 2013 23:39:07 Marco Martin wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 11:00 PM, Thomas Pfeiffer 
wrote:
> > > think we can't do anything about it.
> > > images done after the name change are correct and are going to correctly
> > > update.
> > > installations older than thast, don't think can be fixed (if somebody
> > 
> > with
> > 
> > > more packaging-fu has an idea, please do tell ;)
> > 
> > I don't mind if my RC won't upgrade to the final image correctly, I can
> > just
> > reinstall. What we should think about is if we think we need to provide a
> > working upgrade path from PA3 to PA4 or if we think that it's okay for
> > those
> > few who have installed PA3 on their device to do a reinstall with PA4.
> > 
> > What is our approach here?
> 
> iirc pa3 still used repos on meego obs, so even the repo urls have changed

True. So we probably should go with Carl's suggestion to explicitly tell 
people that migration from PA3 isn't possible and if they've used PA3, they 
should reinstall.
Is it possible to migrate all user data? Nepomuk data should be able to be 
migrated using Nepomuk backup/restore, right? What about Activities and 
connected resources?
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Zypper up on stable PA4 image killed Maliit

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Thursday 29 August 2013 22:53:42 you wrote:
> n Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 9:38 PM, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> > Hi,
> > last night I did another zypper up on my stable image to get the Add Ons
> > fix. I
> > got quite a few packages upgraded or installed: Among others, all the
> > maliit
> > packages were replaced by versions with a -qt4 suffix or upgraded and,
> > several
> > qt5 packages were installed.
> > Since the next reboot, the virtual keyboard won't show up anymore.
> > What happened? This has to be fixed before release so that zypper up won't
> > leave people without a keyboard.
> 
> I had to rename those packages since nemo now ships with packages with the
> exact same name but built for qt5 and we have to avoid those (apparently on
> some sdk installations it produced good images, on others got confused and
> couldn't produce an image).
> 
> generated images do work, i just tried to do a new one, seems fine.
> 
> it's weird that update doesn't work, probably pulled the qt5 version
> together the qt4 one.
> but being a package called "maliit-framework" based on qt5 in nemo i don't
> think we can't do anything about it.
> images done after the name change are correct and are going to correctly
> update.
> installations older than thast, don't think can be fixed (if somebody with
> more packaging-fu has an idea, please do tell ;)

I don't mind if my RC won't upgrade to the final image correctly, I can just 
reinstall. What we should think about is if we think we need to provide a 
working upgrade path from PA3 to PA4 or if we think that it's okay for those 
few who have installed PA3 on their device to do a reinstall with PA4.

What is our approach here?
Cheers,
Thomas
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Zypper up on stable PA4 image killed Maliit

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

Hi,
last night I did another zypper up on my stable image to get the Add Ons fix. I 
got quite a few packages upgraded or installed: Among others, all the maliit 
packages were replaced by versions with a -qt4 suffix or upgraded and, several 
qt5 packages were installed.
Since the next reboot, the virtual keyboard won't show up anymore.
What happened? This has to be fixed before release so that zypper up won't 
leave people without a keyboard.
Cheers,
Thomas
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Chores for release

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Thursday 22 August 2013 20:22:03 Marco Martin wrote:
> Hi all,
> So, now the image generation is fine and does images that are testyed to
> work well, and i have tarballs for ftp.kde.org (see email some days ago).
> 
> Now, what remains to do?
> I would say mainly
> * announcement text,
> *screenshots
> * new text for the plasma-active.org website
> * (are the videos needed together the release?)
> * forgotten something?
> 
> who is working on that at the moment? any eta?

I think the videos should be made available soon, but they do not necessarily 
have to be available at the exact release date.
Most of the tasks on the list were taken by Jos or Carl (or both), so they 
should be able to tell when they'll be done.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: wiki cleanup: Development

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Sunday 18 August 2013 23:06:43 Bogdan Cristea wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I am unable to modify PA wiki with my kde account. 

You have an Identity account and yet you cannot edit community.kde.org? That 
sounds weird. Have you clicked "OpenID / Identity login" and then Identity?

___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Wiki cleanup: tasks

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Tuesday 20 August 2013 19:18:47 you wrote:
> there is a section called "Unclaimed" but every task that has a question
> mark behind "owner:" should be considered unclaimed right?
> 
> Is this page supposed to become a the landing page for potential
> contributors or is this an "internal" list to keep track of ongoing
> development?

Right now it's "internal" until we've explored them more and made them "new- 
contributor-ready". The distinction between "claimed" and "unclaimed" does not 
make sense at this point, though, you're right. I'll remove it.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: wiki cleanup: release notes

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Tuesday 20 August 2013 19:04:03 Michael Bohlender wrote:
> http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/ReleaseNotes/2.0
> 
> there are no release notes for PA 3
> 
> do we want/ need release notes for PA 4 or should just delete the link from
> http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/ ve/ReleaseNotes/2.0> ?

We can definitely delete the 2.0 release notes. If the promo team would like to 
collect input for the PA4 release notes on the wiki, we can put a page for 
that here. If not, we don't need it.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Wiki cleanup: tasks

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Tuesday 20 August 2013 15:03:20 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> On 20.08.2013 14:29, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> > On Friday, August 16, 2013 18:14:05 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> >> On Friday 16 August 2013 17:51:05 Michael Bohlender wrote:
> >>> And the cleanup begins:
> >>> 
> >>> http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Tasks
> >>> 
> >>> The Page lists tasks, why they are important and so on. This was last
> >>> edited a year ago. Looks like we are not using it anymore. Can this Page
> >>> be
> >>> deleted?
> >> 
> >> I wouldn't delete it. It should be used as a resource when planning PA5
> >> (see  what of these things is done and what is still to do). I'd move it
> >> to
> >> development, though.
> > 
> > We can ditch all the tasks in there, a random collection of tasks that
> > isn't maintained is not useful, and only adds to the amount of useless
> > information, making the actual useful info harder to find.
> > 
> > I'd be for deleting it, or at least emptying it.
> 
> I'll maintain it, then. I'll go through the tasks, remove all those that
> are either finished or do not apply anymore and update the ones that are
> still relevant, if needed.
> And then I'll move it to Development.

Done. Actually, the vast majority of the tasks are still open and most of them 
are still as relevant as they were when that page was written. I have deleted 
all tasks that are completed or irrelevant now and reduced those that are 
partially completed to the parts that are still to do.
When planning what we should do for future iterations, we should definitely 
take a look at this list, it contains some really interesting information.

___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Wiki cleanup: tasks

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 20.08.2013 14:29, Sebastian Kügler wrote:

On Friday, August 16, 2013 18:14:05 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:

On Friday 16 August 2013 17:51:05 Michael Bohlender wrote:

And the cleanup begins:

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

The Page lists tasks, why they are important and so on. This was last
edited a year ago. Looks like we are not using it anymore. Can this Page
be
deleted?


I wouldn't delete it. It should be used as a resource when planning PA5
(see  what of these things is done and what is still to do). I'd move it to
development, though.


We can ditch all the tasks in there, a random collection of tasks that isn't
maintained is not useful, and only adds to the amount of useless information,
making the actual useful info harder to find.

I'd be for deleting it, or at least emptying it.


I'll maintain it, then. I'll go through the tasks, remove all those that 
are either finished or do not apply anymore and update the ones that are 
still relevant, if needed.

And then I'll move it to Development.

___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 320234] When an application is removed from an Activity and added again, it appears as a bookmark

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=320234

--- Comment #1 from Thomas Pfeiffer  ---
This happens with the newest Devel image as well.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 320237] Indexing seems completely broken in RC1

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=320237

--- Comment #7 from Thomas Pfeiffer  ---
This bug does not happen with the latest Devel image, so it seems to be
specific to the rc1 image.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: [Kde-pim] Kontact Touch Mail - Usecases

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Saturday 25 May 2013 23:46:08 Heiko Tietze wrote:
> Am Samstag, 25. Mai 2013, 18:17:45 schrieb Thomas Pfeiffer:
> > The list was originally written not in order to prioritize
> > implementation...
> Well, that's a horse of a different color :-).

Yes. We should have clarified that before you reviewed it... On the other hand, 
this misunderstanding brought us your list of prioritized requirements, so 
it's a good thing in the end :)

> > I've written some comments on them.
> |
> |list=mailing list.
> 
> Isn't it rather a feature of the addressbook, if at all? Emails can be sent
> to a list of receivers but this list gets separated first. And when I write
> to active@kde.org for instance then I do not write to all single
> reciepients. Or am I wrong?

One example usage scenario is this:
Someone sends a mail to a mailing list (like active@kde.org) as well as to you 
personally (and maybe other people as well). Now if you reply directly, you 
only reply to the author. You could reply to all, but you might want to keep 
the discussion only on the list. 

Another scenario is a case are mailing lists which do not automatically set 
the mailing list as reply-to address when they send out mails. If you just hit 
"reply" on a mail from such lists, you reply only to the author, not the list.

For these scenarios, e.g. KMail or Thunderbird have a specific "Reply to 
Mailing-List" option, which only sends to the mailing list from which you 
received the mail (in addition to receiving it personally).

This is surely not a must-have, but I've been using it quite a few times.

> |User Experience
> 
> I want to add some kind of soft feature. Mobile devices are used more to
> pleasure than desktop computers. Therefore joy of use becomes relevant.

Yes, no objection to that.

> |(?) Design fancy dialogs Thomas: If by that you mean "Make the UI look
> different to the rest of the system" then I'm against it
> Nope, unless the rest of the UI will be designed as ugly as possible :-). It
> should have a nice appearence. (But UI has to be as well "normal" as stated
> once before)

Ah, okay. It's just that in me, "fancy" triggers the "A designer has done 
something which looks cool, but offers zero consistency with the rest of the 
system"alarm. There surely are cases where deviating from the platform 
standards makes sense (like games or some multimedia apps), but I don't think 
a mail client is one of them.
Maybe we should just replace "fancy" with "Aesthetically pleasing"?
 
> |User Actions
> 
> Common
> +Mark as spam (sadly common)

Depending on the spam filtering system of your email provider, this may indeed 
be a common feature. This should only appear if spam filtering has been 
activated, though. I would not use client-side filtering on my Web.de account, 
for example, because the provider takes care of that for me and if I marked a 
mail as spam locally, that information would not reach Web.de.
I'll add it.

> Uncommon/Rare
> +Format email text (html)
> +Show details, e.g. size of email(s)

Yes. I'll add those.

> +Userdefined tags, favorite, note, task etc. (or is it SLC?) btw: I don't
> know what SLC mean. Perhaps it should get written out somewhere if I'm not
> the only one.

Yes this should be done via SLC. SLC stands for "Share/Like/Connect" and is a 
system-wide system for resource-specific actions. See 
http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Development/ActiveHIG/SLC for details.

Thanks again,
Thomas
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 320237] Indexing seems completely broken in RC1

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=320237

--- Comment #6 from Thomas Pfeiffer  ---
Reinstalling the same image at least did not fix the issue for me.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: [Kde-pim] Kontact Touch Mail - Usecases

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Saturday 25 May 2013 17:10:34 Heiko Tietze wrote:
> On Sunday, 2013-05-19, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> > On Friday 17 May 2013 19:23:11 Michael Bohlender wrote:
> > Björn, Kevin, what's your take? Please review the wiki page as well,
> > thanks!
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Bjoern asked me to do the review because he is very short in time. So here
> are my two cents:

Thanks for pitching in!

> * You did collect requirements, not use cases.

True. I think the level of user requirements presented in this list is okay 
for a project of this size, though. Defining actual use cases may be useful as 
well, but I feel that the requirements should do at least for now.

> * Software shouldn't contain "exotic" function in terms of unnecessary
> stuff. According Kano (and the respective method -> Wikipedia) there are
> basic functions, performance features, excitement stuff, and features that
> lead to rejection. Prioritization includes those features and the amount of
> work. But all core functions (aka basic features) should be available.

A well, we have different goals here: The list was originally written not in 
order to prioritize implementation, but to decide how prominently a feature 
should be placed in the UI. That's why the categories are related to frequency 
of use, not to importance. However, the category labels where probably 
misleading. I've updated the page with new suggested frequency categories.
This also explains for example why spell checking is in the "core" category in 
our list but you suggest putting it in the "buzz features" category (and I 
agree to that): Users can live without it, but if it's there, it should be 
placed prominently in the "New mail" screen because it's used regularly when 
writing a mail.

> * I'd recommend to reorganize the bullets. My proposal can be found at top
> of http://community.kde.org/index.php?title=Plasma/Active/mail (original is
> below )

I believe that in the end, we need both: A list of requirements including 
priorities to decide what to implement when, and a list of "user actions" with 
estimated frequencies of use to decide what to place prominently.
So I'd suggest keeping both lists, each for its own purpose, but harmonizing 
them (e.g. a feature we deem frequent is most likely also a basic 
requirement).

> * I added some requirements from kmail but don't know how interessting they
> are because of its technological relation (e.g. authentification) -> marked
> with ?

I've written some comments on them.

> * I would propose to change some priorities. Have a look for "C -> A", for
> instance.

I've changed those where I agree and commented where I don't.

> Cheers,
> Heiko.

Cheers,
Thomas
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 320237] Indexing seems completely broken in RC1

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=320237

--- Comment #4 from Thomas Pfeiffer  ---
Here is the output of nepomukindexer (same on two files):

nepomukindexer(1027)/nepomuk (strigi service): SimpleIndexError:  "_:a does not
exist in the graph. In statement (_:ub,
http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/01/19/nie#url, _:a)" 
nepomukindexer(1027)/nepomuk (strigi service): "_:a does not exist in the
graph. In statement (_:ub,
http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/01/19/nie#url, _:a)" 

nepomukshow does not seem to be installed

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 320238] New: Images are named "undefined" in Images

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=320238

Bug ID: 320238
   Summary: Images are named "undefined" in Images
Classification: Unclassified
   Product: Active
   Version: Testing
  Platform: Other
OS: Linux
Status: UNCONFIRMED
  Severity: normal
  Priority: NOR
 Component: Applications
  Assignee: active@kde.org
  Reporter: colo...@autistici.org

When you make the chrome come up in Images (by tapping) the center of the
navigation bar at the top reads "undefined (11 out of 21)". I don't know what's
supposed to be there, nut "undefined" is definitely not what we want there. I
don't even think having the numbers there is useful information when you
navigate by the images themselves anyway.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Images
2. Tap

Actual Results:  
Navigation bar reads "undefined (11 out of 21)"

Expected Results:  
Either something useful or nothing

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Testing PA4 release candidates

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

Hi everyone,
now that we have the PA4 release candidates, we need to go into heavy testing 
/ fixing mode.
Currently, the RC has quite a few more or less serious bugs (one absolute 
blocker is among them: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=320237 ). This 
shows that testing is crucial.
Thanks to Mike, we have an (probably still incomplete) list of test cases 
here:
http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Testing
Please, everyone who has a device that can run PA, go try those cases out with 
the RC and try as many other things as possible. At least the x86 image has to 
be free of all showstoppers and embarrassingly obvious flows for release.
Let's all work together to get PA4 in shape soon!

Thomas
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: repos and kickstarts for pa4

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Wednesday 22 May 2013 00:10:40 Michael Bohlender wrote:
> I guess we could really use a "formal" list for testing so I started one
> with the things that Thomas usually tests:
> 
> community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Testing

Thanks!
I've added some test cases.

> 
> I'm trying this as a live disk on my lenovo s10-3t and notice that the
> 
> > about screen says it's version 3 still, instead of version 4.
> 
> good catch. I submitted a patch.

Great!
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 318818] No files of other types found if album/artist filter in Music is still activated

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318818

Thomas Pfeiffer  changed:

   What|Removed |Added

 Status|UNCONFIRMED |CONFIRMED
 Ever confirmed|0   |1

--- Comment #1 from Thomas Pfeiffer  ---
The same effect happens when changing file types while a tag filter is still
active (regardless of file type)

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 320237] New: Indexing seems completely broken in RC1

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=320237

Bug ID: 320237
   Summary: Indexing seems completely broken in RC1
Classification: Unclassified
   Product: Active
   Version: Testing
  Platform: Other
OS: Linux
Status: UNCONFIRMED
  Severity: critical
  Priority: NOR
 Component: General
  Assignee: active@kde.org
  Reporter: colo...@autistici.org

Indexing does not work correctly at all in RC1:
- Newly copied/created files do not show up in Files or Add Items
- Artist/Album info for Music files is not available
- When I go to the Desktop Search settings and de- and reactivate indexing or
tap "Check for New Files" in the Advanced Settings tab, the indexer claims to
be indexing the files, but they do not show up
- If I tap "Clear Index" and then "Check for New Files", it claims to index
files but afterwards, no files show up in Files anymore (not even the
pre-installed ones)
- Rebooting does not help

Reproducible: Always

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 320236] New: Recommendations drawer is still visible

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=320236

Bug ID: 320236
   Summary: Recommendations drawer is still visible
Classification: Unclassified
   Product: Active
   Version: Testing
  Platform: Other
OS: Linux
Status: UNCONFIRMED
  Severity: major
  Priority: NOR
 Component: Contour recommendations manager
  Assignee: notm...@gmail.com
  Reporter: colo...@autistici.org
CC: active@kde.org

As far as I know, we decided to remove the recommendations drawer since it
doesn't really do anything useful atm. anyway.
However, it's still visible in the rc1

Reproducible: Always

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are on the CC list for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 320235] New: Adding an application selected in one Activity to another via SLC causes problems

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=320235

Bug ID: 320235
   Summary: Adding an application selected in one Activity to
another via SLC causes problems
Classification: Unclassified
   Product: Active
   Version: Testing
  Platform: Other
OS: Linux
Status: UNCONFIRMED
  Severity: major
  Priority: NOR
 Component: Share Like Connect
  Assignee: notm...@gmail.com
  Reporter: colo...@autistici.org
CC: active@kde.org

When I select aqn App on an Acitivty and try to add it to another one via SLC,
the following happens:
- It sometimes disappears on the first Activity (which it shouldn't)
- It appears on the other one as a bookmark rather than an Activity

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Select an Application on an Activity Screen
2. Select Connect
3. Select a different activity

Actual Results:  
(see above)

Expected Results:  
It appears on the second Activity in Apps in addition to the first one.

Found in the PA4 rc1 image.
Probably related to bug 320234

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are on the CC list for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 320234] New: When an application is removed from an Activity and added again, it appears as a bookmark

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=320234

Bug ID: 320234
   Summary: When an application is removed from an Activity and
added again, it appears as a bookmark
Classification: Unclassified
   Product: Active
   Version: Testing
  Platform: Other
OS: Linux
Status: UNCONFIRMED
  Severity: normal
  Priority: NOR
 Component: General
  Assignee: active@kde.org
  Reporter: colo...@autistici.org

When I remove an application from an Activity via SLC and add it again, this
happens:
In the Apps group and additionally in Bookmarks there appears a bookmark icon
with the path to the application ("usr/share/applications/...") as a name.
Tapping it, however, starts the application.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Add an application to an Activity
2. Select it
3. Tap Connect -> Activities -> Current Activity
4. Add the same application to the same Activity again
Actual Results:  
Appears looking like a bookmark in Apps and Bookmarks

Expected Results:  
Appears normally

Found in the PA4 rc1 image.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: repos and kickstarts for pa4

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 22.05.2013 18:26, Paul S wrote:

On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 7:51 AM, Thomas Pfeiffer mailto:colo...@autistici.org>> wrote:

It seems like you are confusing MeeGo and Mer. Mer is a community
continuation of MeeGo. Our images do not use MeeGo, it's just Mer,
with Plasma Active on top and the Nemo Mobile integration parts
(e.g. the kernel) below.


Yes I was, thanks for correcting my ignorance.


No problem, just wanted to make clear we're talking about the same things.


Complaining is the one thing that won't help you.

I apologize if it sounds like just complaining. I was trying to provide
useful feedback of an early image. Perhaps my words aren't as good as
they should be. I hope no hard feelings.


No hard feelings on my side, I didn't make Mer ;)
I'd just like to initiate a shift in mindsets: From "PA on Mer does not 
work correctly on my device!", which we hear from pretty much everyone 
who tries to use it on a device where nobody used it before, to "I see 
that a lot of work still has to be put into making it work on this 
device. How do we get that work started?"


Of course the problem is: How do users distinguish bugs related to 
hardware integration from actual PA- or Mer-Bugs? This is a problem I 
have no solution for yet. One indicator might be that it's a fairly 
obvious and critical bug which has not yet been reported on 
bugs.kde.org. In this case, it's unlikely that it happens on the devices 
we use as well without having been reported yet.


___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: repos and kickstarts for pa4

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 21.05.2013 16:48, Marco Martin wrote:

On Monday 20 May 2013 16:13:47 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:

hopefully there will be soon images based on this kickstart


I'd suggest to start a collaborative intense testing phase as soon as the
images are available. Everyone with a device should test hell out of it.
A group of students has been trying out my tablet recently (they will be
conducting usability tests with it) and still found quite a few problems,
and I did not have the chance to systematically test recently.




and here's the link

https://share.basyskom.com/plasma-active/deployment/wetab-exopc/tablet/mer/testing/basyskom-plasma-active-four-wetab-exopc-tablet-mer-release-rc.iso


I'll start testing when I get my WeTab back on Friday. The students have 
already found quite a few problems while getting to know it, some of 
them quite ugly. I'll try to reproduce them with the stable image and 
report them if I can.


___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: repos and kickstarts for pa4

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 22.05.2013 00:59, Paul S wrote:

On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 6:10 PM, Michael Bohlender
mailto:michael.bohlen...@kdemail.net>>
wrote:


I'm trying this as a live disk on my lenovo s10-3t and notice
that the about screen says it's version 3 still, instead of
version 4.


I didn't realize how crippled meego is for something like my netbook.
Even though I loaded my wireless module bcrmsmac and got no errors in
dmesg, I can't find a way to create the wlan0 device. So no wifi here.
Also, I notice it takes 8 to 9 minutes to get it to wake up from sleep.
I've done this 3 times, so it's not a fluke .. Also, I tried installing
firfox from mozilla.org , and can't get it to run.
Why would anyone with X86 hardware want to run this crippled meego? I
think you should stop producing it.

On the other hand, I tried kububu-active sausy iso from yesterday and it
won't give me a usable screen. It boots to a screen that's divided into
3 or 6 of the same image in each third or 6th of the screen.

It's too bad you can't use the mer from your meego distro with kubuntu.

The mer part seems pretty useful and stable. I didn't have any crashes
yet and the touchscreen is working fine. These are the parts that never
work on kubuntu.


It seems like you are confusing MeeGo and Mer. Mer is a community 
continuation of MeeGo. Our images do not use MeeGo, it's just Mer, with 
Plasma Active on top and the Nemo Mobile integration parts (e.g. the 
kernel) below.


Plasma Active on Mer works pretty well on WeTab/ExpPC devices now, I'd 
say way better than on Kubuntu or openSUSE, because it's optimized for 
mobile devices.


The problem is: Things hardly ever work well out of the box on tablets. 
There always has to be someone who irons out the quirks of each device 
until a system runs smoothly on it. This is a whole lot of work to do. 
For WeTab/ExoPC, that someone has been Maurice de la Ferte and is now 
Marco Martin. For Nexus 7, that someone is Ruediger Gad.
Maurice and Marco have already spent a lot of time on getting Mer to run 
well on WeTab/ExoPC, that's why it works pretty well now. Ruediger 
started working on the port to Nexus 7 much later, that's why there are 
still more problems there.


For the  lenovo s10-3t, nobody did that work yet, so it's to be expected 
that many things don't work yet. In fact, I'm very surprised that it 
boots into PA at all!

Welcome to the mobile world! Sadly, this is how things roll here.
Even communities or companies building an operating system for one 
specific device struggle in the beginning (remember OpenMoko? They 
worked on that for years and it still had lots of problems!).
And I am very certain that it costs even the engineers at Samsung quite 
a few grey hairs until they get Android to run smoothly on a completely 
new device.


So don't blame the Mer community. You have a few options to solve your 
problem:
- Invest the time (probably quite a few days or maybe even weeks) 
necessary to get Mer (or Kubuntu Active or whatever distro that offers 
PA packagaes) to work well with your device

- Get someone else to do it (you'll need quite a good incentive for that)
- Wait for the Vivaldi. If you read Aaron's blog, you know how much time 
was already put into getting Plasma Active on Mer to work on that device 
(which is not Mer's fault!) and afaik it's still not finished, but when 
it's out, you'll know it will work well.

- Get a WeTab/ExoPC
- Wait until the Nexus 7 images work well (there are quite a few PA 
users with Nexus 7 devices already, so chances are more people will step 
up to help Ruediger in the near future) and then get one of those


Complaining is the one thing that won't help you.

Cheers,
Thomas
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: repos and kickstarts for pa4

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Monday 20 May 2013 14:31:48 Hillel Lubman wrote:
> I can do it on Nexus 7 (which has current devel image though it doesn't
> load the UI anymore after the most recent update %). 

Great! Any help is greatly appreciated!
The problem is that Marco, who currently does most of the integration work, 
does not have a Nexus 7 so he cannot test on his device.
The champion of PA on Nexus 7 is Ruediger Gad, so maybe he has time to look 
into the problems there.

> Is there any list of formal tests, or it's do whatever comes to mind?

We do not have a list of formal tests (yet), so for now it's "do whatever 
comes to mind". Some things I usually check because they often break are
- Creating / editing / deleting Activities
- Adding files to Activities (via Add Items and via SLC) and removing them 
again
- Starting several applications and switching between them
- Files:
- Tagging files
- Copying files from/to an external storage device
- Deleting files
- Using the metadata filters (image size or Artist/Album for music)
- Browsing the Web
- Sending the device to sleep and waking it up again
- Browsing though images
- Changing screen settings
- Downloading Add Ons

Others surely have more things to add to this list, but I hope it already 
helps.

Cheers,
Thomas
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: repos and kickstarts for pa4

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Monday 20 May 2013 14:16:55 Marco Martin wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> we have a new stable option for images creation.
> 
> in the plasma-active-kickstart git repo, there is a new yaml for image
> creation.
> 
> so, if you do
> 
> mer-kickstarter -e . -c releases/plasma-active-4.yaml -o
> plasma-active-latest- ks/
> 
> it will generate kickstarts from kde:stable:* and "fixed" releases for nemo
> and mer. this will be the basis of pa4.
> 
> also, new repositories are enabled in the image:
> * mer-updates: it will contain bugfix updates for the base system if neede
> (hopefully none)
> * kde:apps : it will contain 3rd party apps and packages based on kde. being
> enabled on pa4 new packages can land there post release and will be easy
> installable on pa4 systems
> 
> hopefully there will be soon images based on this kickstart

I'd suggest to start a collaborative intense testing phase as soon as the 
images are available. Everyone with a device should test hell out of it.
A group of students has been trying out my tablet recently (they will be 
conducting usability tests with it) and still found quite a few problems, and 
I did not have the chance to systematically test recently.

___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 320034] Slowness of the Plasma Active topbar UI after startup on Nexus 7

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=320034

Thomas Pfeiffer  changed:

   What|Removed |Added

 Status|UNCONFIRMED |CONFIRMED
 CC||colo...@autistici.org
 Ever confirmed|0   |1

--- Comment #2 from Thomas Pfeiffer  ---
The reason for this is that all the elements in the Peak & Launch area (the
ones that are shown when you poll the Top Bar down) are only loaded the first
time you pull it down, in order to decrease startup time.

Each time I present PA to someone right after booting, though, I get the
feeling that maybe this turned out to not have been such a good idea after all:
This is often one of the first things people to, and since it feels really
really slow, the first impression people get from using PA is "Oh, it's slow!".

So I'm starting to think that maybe these elements should be loaded at startup
after all, because it's probably less noticeable if the startup takes a few
seconds longer than if an interaction feels horribly slow.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Kontact Touch Mail - Usecases

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Friday 17 May 2013 19:23:11 Michael Bohlender wrote:
> Hello everyone
> 
> The discussion about the initial mockups has shown that we need to agree on
> the usecases for Kontact Touch Mail first before we continue. I created a
> wikipage for that:
> http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/mail#Usecases
> 
> Feel free to  post any usecase you want to see enabled and we will discuss
> and classify them. This is not limited to what can be done in a single GSoC
> project. We need to be aware of everything we want to support as the
> general interaction design will likely constrain future features.
> 
> My goal is to enable a set of core workflows that are likely to appear on a
> mobile/tablet device while keeping the PIM suite concept and "business
> users" in mind.  This means that I will not copy over every function of the
> our desktop KMail but it also does not meant that the possible usecases are
> constrained to this core set. Other workflows should be possible but they
> might not be as elegant or prominent in the UI.
> 
> Thanks for your participation.
> 
> Mike

Nice approach to the usecase list!
I've added some usecases and moved some around, accordeing to my opinion (see 
history for details).
Björn, Kevin, what's your take? Please review the wiki page as well, thanks!
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: [Kde-pim] Kontact Touch Mail - Initial Mockup + Git Workflow

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Thursday 16 May 2013 20:58:11 Michael Bohlender wrote:
> Let me present to you: Iteration number 2
> https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B2wLkUtvD4v_ejZKU1g2ckM3aEU&usp=shar
> ing&tid=0B2wLkUtvD4v_SjBnTWx5YklnRTQ

Good improvements overall!

> Based on your feedback I changed:
> 
> # column background color
> # list position indicator

Nice, things look more clear now.

> # position of "new" and "important" to top

I assume there currently is no way to visually separate the two from the 
others?

> # renamed "new" to "new / unread"

Is there a difference between new and unread?

> # new "add own folders..."

I'm not sure if this is the optimal wording, but that can still be optimized 
later on.

> # new/important/delete button row replaced with drag&drop (not implemented)
> and/or a dialog that can be accessed by taping the mail-status icon
> bonus: the removal gives  a little more space for a second line of preview
 
> I did not want to let go of the quick tapping solution for the lionmail
> workflow. This is a solution without the visual clutter that should also
> work on smaller screens.

As long as a mail can be opened with single tap and as long as you can still 
start dragging from the icon, I'm absolutely fine with this. It's a good 
alternative for people who don't like drag & drop and/or have problems with 
it.
 
> This will be the last mockup before GSoC. We need to agree on our usecases
> first before we continue. I will write down what I have in mind over the
> weekend so that we have a base for our discussion.

Yes, this has to be done very soon.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: [Kde-pim] Kontact Touch Mail - Initial Mockup + Git Workflow

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 16.05.2013 11:47, Björn Balazs wrote:

Hi Thomas, Michael, all,



Ok, then I might have been on the wrong track, but as far as I understand the
pattern you were referring to, multiple columns are the basic idea of it?!?


Multiple columns for the general UI, but not for navigating a folder 
hierarchy, specifically.



Actually "New" has gotten me on the wrong track.


Yes, maybe that has to be renamed to "unread" (especially since I'm not 
sure if KMail distinguishes between "new" and "unread" like Thunderbird 
does anyway).



I agree 100% that drag&drop
is great (not only) for touch devices and would not question that. What I fear
are inconsistencies in respect of the result after dragging (and hence
problems with building up the mental model by the user):



Mails are usually single instance items, so when dragging them to a different
folder they get moved there. Copying mails is really a rare use-case and
should be possible, but could be done somehow different. Now when the user is
in a folder (by the way: How is the currently active folder visualized? -
missing the mocks) and he drags a mial e.g. to Trash, that mail is moved
there. If on the other hand she moves it to important only the state and not
the place of the mail is changed. This could be confusing and is inconsistent.

To suggest a solution: We could somehow visually seperate real and virtual
folders - that would solve this inconsistency.


Yes. The two virtual folders should be placed before the others and 
either be visually separated from the rest or should look slightly 
different.



Summing it up - as far as I understand the mockup, it oversimplifies a bit
too much. The matter is complex. Unfortunately.


What I take from this is that we first need to define the usecase of KMail
Touch / Active / Whateveritwillbecalled:
Kontact Touch had the goal to be full-featured Kontact, just with a touch-
optimized GUI. I know where that goal came from, but I don't think it was an
ideal goal, and thus I don't think it should be the goal for our new
approach. I do not believe it's possible to create a GUI that allows you to
manage every aspect of enterprise-grade PIM comfortably on a mobile device,
no matter how smart the interaction designers are.
And I think that's why the current Kontact Touch - despite having been
designed by smart people such as yourself - doesn't live up to its
potential.

This is an opinion which Mike obviously shares, and form previous
discussions it seems to me that many others from the Plasma Active team
share as well.

What I see as typical usecases for mobile mail is reading up on important
mails and replying to them, or writing new mails from scratch of course.
Mike seems to have thought something similar, as he oriented his approach
towards Lionmail, which is optimized for a pretty similar usecase (reading
up on new emails and deciding what to do with them quickly).

So I don't think the current approach is oversimplifying things, but instead
is focusing on the usecases that are likely to be done on a mobile device,
and that's why I like it.
Surely it has to be possible to access all emails on your huge IMAP account
with dozens of deeply nested folders from your mobile device as well, but
this is probably a rather rare usecase which does not have to be offered
prominently in the main UI.


Well, I do have to disagree here a bit. People use mail quite differently.
There are people that make excessive use of pre-sorting of mail, either using
Sieve or clients rules. This has nothing to do with a business environment.


Absolutely. Actually, I'm one of those people. However, on a mobile 
device, I would be satisfied with seeing all unread mails in one place, 
have quick access to my most frequently used folders and have a 
not-so-quick way to access the other mails in the rare cases I need to 
have a look at them later.



Other people just leave everything in the inbox and work with read / unread
status only and others again use flags like important / unimportant to manage
their mails.


Yes.


I think a solution should allow all these ways of working with mails (and also
those I forgot). But you are right, we need to agree on the use-cases we want
to cover and if the team decides to leave those other use-cases out, well I
would not be happy, but I will not do the work, so it would be ok...



Another aspect is not only reading the mails, but also cleaning up. For this
the user e.g. has to be able to move the mail to the target destination. Also:
even if we do not want to have full enterprise (or desktop) complexity - as I
do not see the


I agree that there has to be some way to access every email that is on 
the server. However, I think that usecases like quickly dealing with 
incoming mails on the go are more frequent on mobile devices than big 
managing tasks and thus we should _optimize_ for those.
Btw: Some part of your text seems to have been eaten at some point, i 
received only the first half of the last sen

Re: [Kde-pim] Kontact Touch Mail - Initial Mockup + Git Workflow

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Wednesday 15 May 2013 20:35:41 Björn Balazs wrote:

> I would like question whether using the column-based-navigation is actually
> a good decision. Remember that a lot of people have deep hierarchies of
> mail folders. As navigating actually is not the main focus when using mail,
> the navigation area might get too much weight in comparison to the actual
> list of mails within a selected folder, when the pattern is used (at least
> as far as I understand it, you can end up with e.g. 4 columns visible).

I agree that deep folder hierarchies should not lead to having to go through 
multiple columns to get to your mail list, but that doesn't necessarily mean 
we have to abandon the whole approach, especially since tree views are not 
very touch-friendly either.
Suggestions for this follow at the end of this email (because I have to make 
something clear in a reply to your summary beforehand).

> In the same category of problem falls the fact that dragging mails to trash
> will only work as long as the trash folder is visible (which cannot be
> assured using the column-based-navigation). Again, having trash as a
> drop-target while the other elements are for navigation only seems to be
> inconsistent and difficult to understand for the user.

The trash folder would always be visible if we don't navigate through a folder 
hierarchy using the columns (and I agree with you that we shouldn't).

Let's see dropping to which folder would not be possible:
- Inbox: Works
- New: Works (would mark a message as unread)
- Important: Works (would mark as important)
- Outbox: Works (at least Desktop KMail allows that)
- Sent-mail: Works
- Trash: Works
- Template: Should work
- Drafts: Should work

All of these items except for New and Important are just normal folders, and 
so it should be possible to drag emails to them just like in Desktop Kmail. 
The two folders which are "virtual" - New and Important, are both cases where 
dragging mails into them to change their status makes perfect sense to me. So 
where do you perceive an inconsistency?
Files has shown that drag & drop is a much more intuitive interaction on a 
touch device than selecting and pressing a button on a toolbar.

> Summing it up - as far as I understand the mockup, it oversimplifies a bit
> too much. The matter is complex. Unfortunately.

What I take from this is that we first need to define the usecase of KMail 
Touch 
/ Active / Whateveritwillbecalled:
Kontact Touch had the goal to be full-featured Kontact, just with a touch-
optimized GUI. I know where that goal came from, but I don't think it was an 
ideal goal, and thus I don't think it should be the goal for our new approach.
I do not believe it's possible to create a GUI that allows you to manage every 
aspect of enterprise-grade PIM comfortably on a mobile device, no matter how 
smart the interaction designers are.
And I think that's why the current Kontact Touch - despite having been 
designed by smart people such as yourself - doesn't live up to its potential.

This is an opinion which Mike obviously shares, and form previous discussions 
it seems to me that many others from the Plasma Active team share as well.

What I see as typical usecases for mobile mail is reading up on important 
mails and replying to them, or writing new mails from scratch of course. Mike 
seems to have thought something similar, as he oriented his approach towards 
Lionmail, which is optimized for a pretty similar usecase (reading up on new 
emails and deciding what to do with them quickly).

So I don't think the current approach is oversimplifying things, but instead 
is focusing on the usecases that are likely to be done on a mobile device, and 
that's why I like it.
Surely it has to be possible to access all emails on your huge IMAP account 
with dozens of deeply nested folders from your mobile device as well, but this 
is probably a rather rare usecase which does not have to be offered prominently 
in the main UI.

About the navigation through the folder hierarchy: I don't assume this is a 
common usecase for a mobile device. What I'd envision is users selecting a few 
favorite folders which are than shown in the list. 
Maybe add an entry "Select folder" to the list for selecting a folder anywhere 
in the hierarchy which then stays there until another one is selected for the 
case where a user has to deal with old mails somehwere deep in the hierarchy.
New mails are all shown in "new" anyways, no matter where there are in the 
hierarchy.

Cheers,
Thomas
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: [Kde-pim] Kontact Touch Mail - Initial Mockup + Git Workflow

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Wednesday 15 May 2013 14:28:50 Marco Martin wrote:

> ok, so  i changed this in kde-runtime (plasma1) and plsma-framework
> (plasma2)
> 
> if the page item has a big implicitWidth, when it's in the last position it
> will have a width that is
> * at least columnwidth
> * a multiple of columnWidth
> * the nearest multiple of columnWidth
> 
> so is open now to experiments ;)
> 
> bugfixes aside, i would keep its behavior like that.
> so in the case of the email, you would have the folder list a 3rd of the
> screen wide, the message list 2 3rd of the screen.
> if you then click on a message, the message list gets resized to a 3rd and
> the opened message becomes 2 3rds.
> 
> if it's in 3rds, quarters etc is something that isn't decided by the
> application, but by the component, depending from the window size, dpi etc.
> 
> so for instance you would have a big screen, like the wetab, when a message
> is open, you would have a quarter for the folders, one quarter for the
> message list, 2 quarters for the open message, all visible at the same
> time.
> 
> on a 7 inch screen you would have only 2 columns visible at once, with
> horizontal scrolling.
> on an even smaller screen, or vertical 7 inches you would see only a column
> at once, fullscreen, so always having to scroll (ie it always does the best
> it can given screen size and pixel density).

Sounds pretty sensible to me. Of course we can't tell yet what people might 
want to do with a column-based view in the future, but this approach should 
make possible most of what actually makes sense, and it sounds like it adapts 
to different screen sizes / pixel densities very well.
Great!
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: [Kde-pim] Kontact Touch Mail - Initial Mockup + Git Workflow

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Tuesday 14 May 2013 20:38:00 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Tuesday, May 14, 2013 20:17:25 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> > We already have an "important" - "folder", so marking as important should
> > be done by simply dragging one or multiple mails there. The same goes for
> > moving to trash, so these two buttons can simply be removed and the
> > interaction is consistent with Files.
> > Opening should be done by simple tapping, so no need for an "open" button
> 
> I like the idea of dragging into trash or important .. we'll still need a
> way to quickly select multiple emails, so I'd keep the checkboxes. (Long
> pressing on each email to select would be highly annoying)

Absolutely, the checkboxes should stay. However, selecting multiple mails via 
selection rectangle (as in Files) should be possible as well for consistency.
 
> > Yes. Since you're using the same pattern (Column-based navigation,
> > http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Development/ActiveHIG/ColumnViews),
> > it should look and feel similar to Add Ons. Actually, would it be possible
> > to use the actual PageRow component here? If not, why not? Our goal is to
> 
> It is possible, but we won't be moving anything from Add Ons into the Plasma
> 1 QML imports. It uses PlasmaComponents.Page for this, though, so it should
> b easily reproducable.

Erm... so the example code in 
http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Development/ActiveHIG/ColumnViews 
wouldn't work if someone tried to use it?
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: [Kde-pim] Kontact Touch Mail - Initial Mockup + Git Workflow

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Tuesday 14 May 2013 17:30:49 Michael Bohlender wrote:
> > Some small bits of early feedback:

I had originally planned to wait with feedback until there is a version which 
you considered "ready for review", but since others already gave feedback, 
I'll add mine:
 
> > * getting rid of all the repeated buttons for delete, etc. in the list
> > would
> > imho be nice. it's a LOT of visual noise and i'm concerned that on smaller
> > screens they will take up space from the subject text and even be hard to
> > hit
> > accurately with the finger. perhaps move the buttons to the mostly-empty
> > toolbar and require a "select and chose the action" workflow? you already
> > have
> > this in the mail view (the 2nd) mockup, so .. :)
> 
> +1  visual noise and smaller screens are an issue.
> 
> I wanted to allow a lion mail like workflow with the initial page. Therefor
> it would be good to offer these buttons with just one interaction (in this
> case tab) and not two. I was also thinking about enabling
> delete/important/unread/open actions by sliding the list item left/right
> half/complete but I don't know if/how I can make that work/consistent with
> the general app navigation (swiping left/right for next/prev page).

Something that works great with touchscreens and which is already used 
extensively in Files is drag & drop, so this is what should be used here as 
well:
We already have an "important" - "folder", so marking as important should be 
done by simply dragging one or multiple mails there. The same goes for moving 
to trash, so these two buttons can simply be removed and the interaction is 
consistent with Files.
Opening should be done by simple tapping, so no need for an "open" button 
(it's only there in Lionmail because it's opened in a seperate application, 
since Lionmail is not an email client per se. In an email client, anything 
other than a simple tap to open an email in a list would be weird and 
inconsistent with the Column-based Navigation pattern.
What does the "down arrow" button do?

> * in the editor the sidebar is on the right rather than the left like every
> 
> > other mockup. any reason for that?
> 
> the sidebar in 1 and 2 is for navigation/browsing that will give you
> another main area while the sidebar in 3 (editor) is for interaction with
> the main areas content. I could make the sidebar in 1 and 2  use the same
> background as the main area (like the pagerow in bodega client)
> to make this even more evident.

Yes. Since you're using the same pattern (Column-based navigation, 
http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Development/ActiveHIG/ColumnViews), it 
should look and feel similar to Add Ons. Actually, would it be possible to use 
the actual PageRow component here? If not, why not? Our goal is to re-use 
Plasma Components as much as possible, so if they are not suited, this may 
indicate that they need to be improved.

About the Composer view: I like the way KMail handles adding new recipients 
(always leaving one empty row and adding one whenever the last empty row is 
used), would it be possible to use that in KMail Touch as well?

Keep up the good work!
Thomas
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: AP screen shots from ExoPc

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Sunday 12 May 2013 13:48:29 Bogdan Cristea wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Is there a way to take screen shots directly from an ExoPC tablet running AP
> ?

Yes, just install KSnapshot (it should be in the repos).
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Kontact Touch Mail - Initial Mockup + Git Workflow

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Saturday 11 May 2013 17:34:43 Michael Bohlender wrote:
> I tryed to use Pencil for mockups last week but I was not able to come up
> with something usefull. There are no standard components for plasma active,
> so I needed to build them myself and I didn't have the time for that...  I
> gave it another shot this weekend using qml right away and I was way more
> productive:

Yes, without having stencils for the Plasma Components available, Pencil 
probably won't make anyone more productive than doing it in QML right away, 
and it's okay with me to use QML for mockups, as long as I won't hear "I don't 
want to change that, I already put so much work into creating it" ;)
 
> https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B2wLkUtvD4v_SjBnTWx5YklnRTQ&usp=shar
> ing

> Note that this is just a braindump to get started. I will need to take a
> more structured approach during gsoc for doing and assesing mockups.
> This means: actually listing all  the requirements and a  way to juge a
> specific mockup by them.

I won't go into detail at this stage, but there's one thing I can say: It 
already looks much more like PA than what we currently have :)
 
> Now that I have something to work with, I will have a look at packaging /
> obs.
> 
> About the git workflow:
> Would it make sense to :
> 
> # Put the mockups in my personal scretch repository
> # Do feature branches  during gsoc in kde-pim for each of the 4 working
> phases with the goal to merge them at the end of each phase

That's for the techies to answer ;)
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Next release of Plasma Active, some things needed

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Thursday 02 May 2013 17:50:06 Marco Martin wrote:
> On Monday 29 April 2013, Marco Martin wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > With the Plasma Active team, we are thinking about doing a release
> > shortly,
> > since the code is now frozen, what still remains to do is some integration
> > work.
> > I think some of this works also depends from Mer and Nemo (but i could be
> > wrong)
> 
> small update on this: there will be a short irc meeting about this on
> wednesday may 8, 15:00 utc (i guess on #mer-meeting) with some active, nemo
> and mer people.

Is there a log from that meeting somewhere? I couldn't attend, but I'd like to 
know the results :)
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 318260] Plasma-device often crashes on resume from sleep

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318260

--- Comment #2 from Thomas Pfeiffer  ---
This is still reproducible with current Integration packages. It crashed the
very first time I woke my device up from sleep, and DrKonqi froze after having
generated 10864 lines of backtrace. Maybe that was too much for it?
Then I went trough another sleep-resume cycle. Plasma crashed again, this time
restarting itself without DrKonqi opening. Third time same problem.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are on the CC list for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 318301] "zypper up" freezes system on installing nemo-mobile-session-9-1.2

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318301

Thomas Pfeiffer  changed:

   What|Removed |Added

 Status|CONFIRMED   |NEEDSINFO
 CC||colo...@autistici.org
 Resolution|--- |FIXED

--- Comment #2 from Thomas Pfeiffer  ---
Could someone please check whether this still applies? I've never had this
problem, so it seems to be Nexus 7-specific...

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: [Kde-pim] Kontact Touch GSOC Project

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

Oh and make sure to put the proposal on Melange before the deadline. It 
can still be updated later if we need some more info, but it would be a 
pity if you missed the deadline ;)

___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: [Kde-pim] Kontact Touch GSOC Project

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 28.04.2013 14:36, Michael Bohlender wrote:

Thanks for your feedback and your insights.


Sorry for not having replied yet. I'm at a conference with long days 
and bad
internet connection, so I have not found the time to read your updated 
version

and write proper reply yet.
Since Friday is the deadline, I'll use the last bit of power in my 
laptop's battery (no power in the Lobby and the WiFi doesn't reach my 
room) to write a reply now ;)


One thing that should be added to your proposal is deployment: 
Thomas wont
be able to even have a look at your work if you don't update 
packages on
Mer OBS. That doesn't have to be a lot of work, but should 
definitely be

part of your proposal.


It's briefly mentioned in "set up dev environment (obs)", but I agree 
that it
makes sense to write somewhere that there will be regular package 
updates. As
sebas said: I can't compile stuff for the tablet myself, so I need 
packages on
OBS whenever I'm supposed to try something out (maybe I can swap out 
QML files,
but everything which is compiled needs to come to me in compiled 
form).


added to Implementation details.


Thanks, that should work :)

I do like sebas' idea of mixing the two main tasks you outlined 
instead of
doing them strictly one after another. in order to make sure that we 
at least

have _something_ working in the end, come what may.
Maybe you can chop your work into different UI parts which each get a 
design
and an implementation cycle, instead of one big design cycle folowed 
by one

big implementation cycle.


Sounds very reasonable to me.
I divided the work into 5 tasks:
# general layout
# mail list
# display mail
# compose mail
# folder (or whatever way we come up to browse the mail)

We could do 4 of them working 3 weeks on each task with a qml
mockup/prototype followed by the actual implementation.
I can use the idle time (waiting for your feedback) during each
mockup phase to do small tasks like porting a button or things like
that.


Sounds good to me! We just need to make sure that every task is 
self-contained and could be released together with the rest of the old 
GUI in case you can't finish all tasks.



I am a little worried that the whole project is too much work for me
in the given time. Like stated before "asking for a full rewrite of a
mail application UI within a single GSOC is asking for a bit much". If
I don't progress as expected we could skip one of the above tasks and
instead focus on polishing the remaining three.


See above: If it doesn't leave us with something unreleasable, this 
approach should leave us enough flexibility.



Going completely crazy: The whole project looks a lot more achievable
if I pick Tasks or Notes instead of Mail...
But I guess we can't come up with a UX that will work across Kontact
Touch as some problems will only show with complex applications like
Mail ?


Hm, sounds reasonable form the size perspective, but mail is really 
much more important for us than notes or tasks, so I'd prefer having a 
partly improved Mail than a fully improved Notes or Tasks.
Sebas, Aaron, what do you think? Would it make more sense to do Tasks 
or Notes instead of Mail?



reworked proposal:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qxWHUg-STYimYuqxMyPaD2gHiCDoI_m_YNa5mZkpU1Y/edit?usp=sharing
[1]


It's okay from my perspective, and obviously from Kevin's as well. :) 
Unless PA developers have any objections, I think it can stay that way.



I think we need to start earlier with the mockups for the general
design as we wont have that much time during the GSoC period as I
hoped. I
will try to come up with some Pencil mockups next weeks so that we
have a head start.


Maybe you could also start with some of the preparation tasks ahead of 
time, so we can start the mockup phase when GSoC officially starts.


Cheers,
Thomas
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

[Active] [Bug 308240] active-documentviewer crashes by using zoom gestures

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=308240

Thomas Pfeiffer  changed:

   What|Removed |Added

 Status|NEEDSINFO   |CONFIRMED
 CC|colo...@autistici.org   |
 Resolution|WORKSFORME  |---

--- Comment #22 from Thomas Pfeiffer  ---
I have not been able to reproduce it for a while on Wetab, so it seems to be
specific to ARM or Nexus 7.
Now the question is: Do we release with architecture-specific blockers or not?

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: Next release of Plasma Active, some things needed

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 29.04.2013 17:17, Marco Martin wrote:

Hi all,
With the Plasma Active team, we are thinking about doing a release 
shortly,
since the code is now frozen, what still remains to do is some 
integration

work.
I think some of this works also depends from Mer and Nemo (but i could 
be

wrong)

we need basically a target where to build against that stays stable 
for the

time being, and that would include Nemo (basically nemo:stable:mw,
nemo:stable:hw:* repositories) and Mer (a fixed release that stays 
there for a

long time, so mer:devel:latest wouldn't do since changes quite often)

does the above make sense? and most important, does it sound feasible?


Hi Marco,
going for a longer-lasting target of Nemo and Mer (except for security 
fixes) makes sense at least for the stable images, imho.
Users of the stable PA must be able to run zypper up without fearing 
that their system is destroyed.

Devel and Testing users can get newer versions of Mer and Nemo.

But before release, we have to make sure that we find either a fix or a 
workaround for the following bugs:

https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_severity=critical&bug_severity=grave&bug_severity=major&bug_severity=crash&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=CONFIRMED&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&product=Active&list_id=564029
Maybe we can close the browser bug as wontfix for now because we'll 
have to wait for the next webkit, but I don't think we can release with 
the other bugs still untouched. 318522 and 318818 are not critical as 
such, but they mean that a new feature simply doesn't work as it should, 
so if they cannot be fixed, that feature (the album/artist filtering) 
should be removed from PA4 and reintroduced when it's fixed either as a 
backport or in PA5.
318301 seems to be Nexus 7-specific, so we might ignore it if we 
release the PA4 officially only for x86.
Concerning 318816, we must either find a way to open files with PMC or 
install Bangarang by default for that purpose. Not being able to open 
music or video files form Files isn't a releasable state if you ask me.
The Plasma crashes are not catastrophic because Plasma restarts itself 
(at least most of the times) automatically, but being greeted by DrKonqi 
most of the time I unlock my tablet does not look good at all.


Note that I cannot re-test until Friday because I'm at a conference 
with only very slow and crappy WiFi, where downloading 300MB of updates 
would be suicide.


Cheers,
Thomas
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: ktp Active packaged?

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 29.04.2013 12:03, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:

On Monday, April 29, 2013 10:17:58 Sascha Manns wrote:


Hello guys,







just a question: Do we have a package of ktp Active?


Not yet, as far as I know. We should get the ktp developers hooked up
with build.merproject.org so they can maintain packages themselves
without having to rely on coordinating with us all the time.


Currently, David Edmundson maintains KTp (Active), so I guess he's the 
one to

talk to.
___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: [Kde-pim] Kontact Touch GSOC Project

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Friday 26 April 2013 12:34:35 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> Hi Michael,
> 
> On Thursday, April 25, 2013 19:59:18 Michael Bohlender wrote:
> > Considering your feedback I tried to find a project approach that achieves
> > two things: 1. Lots of experimentation on the UX side as Thomas (and I)
> > want to use this project to evaluate current Plasma Active UI/UX
> > possibilities. 2. A stable/fast application because I don't want to invest
> > a summer just to produce something that can/will not be used by anybody.
> > 
> > So my idea is to use the first half of my time to experiment and produce a
> > prototype that can serve as a bases for further UI/UX development for
> > Kontact Touch. And use the second half to work on Kontact Touchs codebase
> > doing cleanup and gradually port things of the prototype over.This way,
> > the
> > results of the second half could be gradually reviewed and merged like it
> > was suggested.
> > I think this is a good tradeoff. What do you think?
> 
> I don't think this will work very well. You'll just notice you'll run out of
> time towards the end, you might be able to get some useful stuff in, but
> you likely won't be able to finish this way. It's just another way of
> postponing the hard work.

I agree with both of you here: Interaction design should to be a big part of 
this project, but on the other hand if at the end of the project we have a 
nice prototype but zero changes to the actual Kmail Touch, there is the danger 
that the code in the prototype just sits there, unused, because nobody finds 
the time to get it into the actual application.
 
> Better: Do design mockups and "getting dirty in the code" simultaneously,
> SoC gives you 40 hours a week, split this up, do 10 hours of design and 30
> hours of coding / merging each week. (The 10 / 30 split is somewhat random,
> for me, design takes much *actual* sitting down than coding, but needs more
> "letting ideas simmer and become clear". For both parts, pick the ones
> first that are relatively independent from each other, then get the working
> areas closer together / move to bigger pieces. There are enough of the
> smaller "port the use of this item to PlasmaComponents"-style tasks.

I agree that getting to a know the internals of Kontact Touch early on makes 
sense because it allows you to get a feeling for the technical feasibility of 
ideas. We want to avoid having great ideas which turn out to just not be 
technically feasible in the end.
Maybe 10:30 isn't the ideal proportion for this project, but I guess you'll 
find your ideal proportion after week or two (though it may still need to be 
adjusted as the project progresses).

> This setup also prevents you from going overboard with design, but makes
> sure you're actually working on something achievable. Moreover, you'll want
> to see your design in action, and you want to iterate over it a few times.
> Pure waterfall sucks in that regard.

Well, iterations are of course key, but UI iterations are preferably done with 
mockups/prototypes and not with fully implemented applications, because the 
more "finished" an application is, the more work is needed to make changes to 
the UI.
There is a big space in between "pure waterfall" and "fully implement 
everything immediately". However, a "Iterate on the design of a certain part 
of the UI with dummy data engines, implement it for real when it's good, then 
move on to the next part" may work, especially since with QML we don't need to 
create throw-away prototype code.

> So, instead of doing en entirely new UI for Kontact Touch, which might be
> well beyond what's possible, try to concentrate on smaller pieces: Do a
> design session on the left-hand-side flap, investigate the mail list, etc,
> and then implement fixes for those. Your current proposal is I think too
> ambitious and bears the risk of never being finished.
> 
> In short: Don't redesign, but improve bit by bit, both in design and in
> code.

Hm, I see we have a conflict of interest here: On the one hand, I want to avoid 
ending up with a prototype which never gets implemented just as much as sebas 
does. On the other hand, I don't want a largely unaltered port from the 
current Kontact Touch QML to Plasma Components, either. Not using Plasma 
Components is not the only problem the current Kontact Touch has within PA. To 
really "Activate" Kontact Touch, many of its UI concepts have to be adapted to 
PA's UI patterns as well, and probably some new ones will have to be created.

I think we'll have to strike a good balance between getting actually working 
code and improving the UI. GSoC is generally more about coding than design, so 
I guess working code is a must-have, but for me, UX improvement is a must as 
well.

I do like sebas' idea of mixing the two main tasks you outlined instead of 
doing them strictly one after another. in order to make sure that we at least 
have _something_ working in the end, come what may.
Maybe you can chop your work 

Re: Qt update in AP from 4.8.3 to 4.8.4

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 26.04.2013 16:00, Bogdan Cristea wrote:

Hi

Are there any chances to have an update of Qt framework from 4.8.3 (as it is
now in AP) to 4.8.4 (for example used by openSUSE 12.3) ? I have noticed a
different behavior when listing the content of a folder with

QDir directory = QDir(currentDir_, "*.*", QDir::Name | QDir::IgnoreCase |
QDir::LocaleAware);

Folder names beginning by a parentheses are displayed first in the list in
4.8.3 while in 4.8.4 the parentheses is ignored and the first letter is
considered.


Afaik, that's not for us to decide since Qt is shipped with Mer. So you 
have to ask the Mer devs to ship a newer Qt version.


___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active

Re: GSoC proposal - Network management for PA

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 26.04.2013 13:45, Sebastian Kügler wrote:

Hi Jan,

On Thursday, April 25, 2013 08:33:22 Jan Grulich wrote:

4) Add support for activities


Why? What use cases do you have in mind? (I'm not saying it's nonsense,
just that it does not directly pop up in front of my virtual eye what
will happen here.)


For example: 1) Home - try to automatically connect to your home wifi
   2) Work - automatically connect to VPN
   3) Travel - turn off wifi and mobile broadband or
active mobile broadband connection

The fact is, that NetworkManager automatically connects to some
available and configured connection so maybe activities support will be
useless.


That could be very useful. I can also imagine to have it switched off (also
bluetooth, and everything), when you're on a flight or train and want to
conserve battery -- although that should be possible in any activity).


While implementing support for Activities in network management sounds 
like a natural thing to do, I'm not sure if it works so well with the 
way Activities are used in PA. In PA, users are likely to have way more 
activities then just "work" and "home" and also switch between them much 
more often, since Activities on PA are useful as a container for each 
larger task / topic instead of just one per _context_. Though of course 
Activities can be used in both ways in any Plasma Workspace, the way we 
designed Activites in PA leans more toward the former.
However if I often switch Activities, I would not want the network 
config to change each time.


However, there is another PA feature which seems almost forgotten by now 
because nobody worked on it since the end of the basyskom project, but 
which I think could work very well with network management: The 
Recommendations framework, with its plugin for the detection of context.


If the systems detects "Ah, my information suggests that you're 
currently on the train, where there is no WiFi anyway", for example, it 
may recommend switching WiFi off (or maybe even doing it automatically), 
until GPS information suggests that the user has arrived at her office 
or home, where it switches on WiFi again and in the office case 
initiates the VPN connection as well.


We currently have all that nice code for the Recommendations engine 
which continuously collects information, but which is currently not put 
to any real use at all. This would be a good use from my perspective.

___
Active mailing list
Active@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active