A week in Valencia

From 19th to 25th of June, all the Plasma team gathered in Valencia, graciously hosted by the Slimbook people in their office. This was a special sprint, as it was co-located with the Usability sprint together with some VDG members. While some of the time each team was occupied in their own discussions, there were a big margin of overlap, allowing us to have a lot of discussions about the design and usability of our beloved Plasma desktop shell.

We now have plans in the coming months for several improvements across the board, including further improvements on the new shiny notification framework by Kai Uwe.

Also, we talked (and worked on) plans for further improving our Wayland support, including middle mouse button clipboard, and screen rotation for phone, tablets and 2 in 1 laptops).

On my end, a big part of this sprint was dedicated to an encompassing plan to refactor and redesign how desktop plasmoids work and are managed. I had there both UI discussions with the VDG and loong coding sessions on it.

The Desktop/FolderView containments use a big infrastructure written in Javascript which has some problems and isn’t touched much since a lot of time.

Some time ago I set myself the task of making the management of desktop plasmoids more touchscreen-friendly, so i started modifying that code, until.. I started to design a complete reimplementation written in C++

This new implementation is much more robust, is faster and a bit leaner on the memory. Most important, is now a separate QML plugin, so is not anymore an implementation internal in the standard desktop, but if somebody wants to write his/her own containment for personalized plasma shells (for instance for a particular embedded device which is not a traditional desktop/laptop: we want plasma more and more usable as a set of construction blocks for the main UI of any kind of device).

In fact, it’s planned for Plasma Mobile to use the same layout manager component, to make the user experience “similar but different” and have less code duplication, while maintaining the UI very distinct between the two very different device types.

UI-wise in the desktop it doesn’t change much for now. the most notable difference is visible resize handles that make managing the layout and moving/resizing the plasmsoids much easier and more intuitive. Especially with touchscreen: now while manipulating plasmoids via touch, the resize handles become way bigger, and is possible to move and resize via a pinch gesture as well.

Lastly (for now!) the behavior during screen resolution switch improved a lot: if you connect a projector with a smaller resolution that relayouts your desktop, or play a fullscreen game at a tiny resolution, when the resolution is restored, everything gets back to normal, no more applets all over the place after changing resolution

All of this should make it into Plasma 5.17.