Hi,
I wanted to share a few thoughts in case it might be helpful right now. I
apologize now for the length. Not that he necessary endorses any of this,
but Thomas Pfeiffer was gracious enough to provide many of the examples of
what we're already doing. A pdf that's a bit more readable is here:
http://goo.gl/kDxkzI
Give People Access to Great Technology
- quote from Akademy 2014 Cornelius Schumacher's keynote
A possible vision
-
As a full time KDE user since 2001 and a more recent contributor, Akademy
2014 was tremendously inspiring and also quite sobering.
How do we respond to the downward trend in the global PC industry that
Cornelius Schumacher highlighted? How do we regain some of the focus Paul
Adams suggests we may have lost? From the design side, it is certainly
helpful for us to have a common focus that informs our design activities,
and the recent discussions on this mailing list about a shared vision show
that other community members agree. So what is a possible wider, shared
vision that might make designs and their implementations more successful,
focused and relevant? What follows are a collection of personal thoughts on
how all these questions might perhaps be considered.
What makes up our personal technology ecosystem?
* Workstation
* Laptop
* Phone
* Tablet
* Camera
* Bluetooth headset/speakers
* Smart watches
* Smart home (TV, Nest, Chromecast)
* Cloud services (storage, contacts, email, calendar, music, photographs,
video, social networking, text/video chat, collaboration)
* Local services or applications (music, imagery, video, documents,
development)
* Vehicle
In this ecosystem, what does “give people access to great technology” mean?
Perhaps it could mean:
Enable people to be even more awesome by taking much greater advantage of
every aspect of their technology ecosystem.
___
In this ecosystem, what does KDE currently provide or participate in?
* Plasma desktop (Workstation, Laptop)
* Plasma Active (tablet)
* Plasma Mediacenter (smart TV)
* KDE Connect (Phone)
* Dolphin (Local services)
* KIO (cloud services - storage)
* Digikam, Gwenview (Local services - photographs, Camera, cloud services -
photographs via KIPI)
* Amarok, Juk (Local services - music, cloud services - music in the case
of Amarok)
* Dragon Player, Jungle (Local services - video, Cloud services - video)
* Kate, Calligra (Local services - documents, cloud services -
collaboration via KTE Collaborative)
* KDevelop (Local services- development)
* Akonadi, Baloo (Local services)
* Akonadi, ownCloud, Kolab (Cloud services)
* Telepathy (Cloud services - social networking)
* Much more...
* Frameworks to enable it all.
The precise categorizations above might be debatable, but not immediately
important. More important perhaps is how we might identify some
opportunities.
* Desktop applications
* Already quite good.
* How can applications take advantage of improved design and better
integration of desktop capabilities to become better applications?
* How can the desktop take greater advantage of application capabilities
to become a better desktop?
* Devices (phones, tablets, smart watches, etc.)
* How can the desktop take advantage of device capabilities to become a
better desktop?
* How can devices take advantage of desktop capabilities to become
better devices?
* Cloud services - our own or others.
* How can the desktop take advantage of cloud capabilities to become a
better desktop?
* How can cloud services become better because of the desktop?
* “Cloud” here includes both centralized and decentralized services.
To be crystal clear, we're already doing a lot of this stuff (and many of
them we’re already talking about) so I think it’s fine to conclude “Hey,
we’re already doing most of that!”. These thoughts are not intended to
suggest an entirely new direction. Rather, the aim is for a common
understanding of shared goals that might be helpful in our communications
within the community and beyond.
So, what might this look like?
Image: http://wstaw.org/m/2014/09/19/A_possible_vision.png
* Desktop at the center.
* Frameworks as enabler.
* Continue creating highly capable applications and even better integration.
* Simple by default, powerful when needed applications [
http://goo.gl/uNlpq3]. Make applications look and work great with
excellent, high-quality functionality and consistent, effective, beautiful
design. Be ambitious. Do not be shy about being best-in-class; see Krita!
* Extend application capabilities by exposing desktop and other
applications’ functions.
* Expose application capabilities to make the desktop more powerful .
* Examples:
* Sessions and Activities
* Saving and sharing desktop and application configurations.
* Searchable application datastores.
* Secure sharing of data between applications.
* Sensible laptop touch screen support in applications.
* Unified theming
* Common design
