This document discusses KDE's Plasma Netbook interface for netbook devices. It highlights that Plasma is a flexible primary UI that can adapt to different form factors without assumptions of being on a desktop. For netbooks, Plasma focuses on content over features through search-based application launching, a "newspaper" interface organized by flickable widgets, and window management without borders or taskbars. Common components like data engines, runners, and plasmoids are designed to work across devices. Future areas of focus include polishing the interface, adding more widgets, caching data for speed, and exploring reuse of components on different touch-enabled devices and form factors.

1. KDE Device spectrum:
Plasma Netbook
Marco Martin

2. Why for netbooks?

3. Why KDE SC?

4. Why KDE SC?
● Configurability
● Rich api
● Solid system to build upon
● Us

5. Why Plasma?

6. Why Plasma?
● Primary UI
● Flexible, no assumptions we are in a desktop
● In some cases secondary ui too
● Start from netbook, first logical step, less alien
● Alessandro will talk about someting even more
challenging

7. What do you want?
● Users
vs
● Developers

8. Users
● Something useful: content content content

9. Users
● Something pretty

10. Developers
● Powerful API

11. Common components
● Separation between data and visualization
● Plasma::Dataengine
● Runners
● They can be used on each shell, regardless of
the visualization
● Plugins, loaded on demand
Data
● Easy to mash-up

12. Common components
● Visual theme engine based on SVG
● Widget set
● Based on QGraphicsView
● Reusable
● Simple API
● Touchscreen friendly widgets like “flickable” scroll
widgets
Visualization

13. Common components
● Plasmoids are designed to work at least:
● Desktop
● Panel
● Netbook newspaper pages
● Standalone windows (from 4.5)
● Fullscreen on mobile devices (some of them)
Plasmoids

14. Netbook: window management
● The desktop is an “application”
● no border maximized windows
● Present windows is the taskbar
● Some other different default settings

15. Netbook: Search and launch

16. Netbook: Search and launch
● Search more intuitive than browsing categories
● Reuses runners
● Simple menu, no trees
● Use of flicking and drag and drop

17. Netbook: newspaper

18. Netbook: newspaper
● Flicking here too
● Primary place for widgets
● Biggest use case: PIM and webservice client
widgets here

19. Future
● Polishing
● More widgets, especially PIM related
● Caching for dataengines
● Different devices: what components can be
reused on netbooks with touchscreen, tablets
or smaller mobile devices?
● Beyond workspaces: application dashboards
for Kontact, Skrooge and Kdevelop