Hands on with Plasma Active One

Touchscreen tablets are all the rage these days, though Linux support for them has arguably been late in coming. While Android has made a (closed) release for tablets, free software alternatives have lagged, though both GNOME and KDE are working on the problem. In fact, KDE recently announced its entrant, Plasma Active One, which is the first of three currently planned releases of its touch-based user experience. Giving the new interface a test drive would seem mandatory.

While Plasma Active One can be run in a virtual machine, that is not the recommended configuration. Instead, the installation wiki page suggests several recent tablet devices, like the WeTab or ExoPC, as test systems. I happened to have another of the suggested devices, a Lenovo Ideapad, due to the generosity of Intel at the Dublin MeeGo conference, so I gave Plasma Active a try on that.

The project provides two different live-USB images for testing Plasma Active One, one based on openSUSE 11.4 and the other based on MeeGo 1.2. Both boot directly into the interface, which, after sliding the unlock icon, lands you on a "Introduction" activity that includes a bit of documentation on how to use the interface along with a video that demonstrates many of its features (which can also be seen on the project home page). Both live images worked well, though slowly, which may be expected when running from USB. To try to see Plasma Active One running at full speed, I installed openSUSE 11.4 (as the MeeGo live image seemed unhappy with the Broadcom WiFi on the Ideapad) and followed the wiki instructions to install it. While the speed definitely improved, it was still kind of pokey (in particular, applications loaded very slowly), which may be a reflection of the hardware rather than Plasma Active One itself.

Activities

"Activities" are the central organizing principle of Plasma Active, and the demo systems come with an example activity ("Vacation Planning") as well as a blank "My First Activity" to be filled in by new users. The idea behind activities is to group selected applications, bookmarks, contacts, documents, images, and other objects into a collection that can be switched to easily as the user changes the tasks they are working on. Activities are accessed from the activity "wheel" (or "switcher", seen at right) that gets "pulled" to the left from a tab on the right-hand side of any activity screen. The wheel allows the users to "spin" through their activities to one of interest using a swipe gesture. It's a little hard to describe the action of the wheel, but the video shows it clearly early on. Users can touch any visible activity to switch to it, and activities can be created and deleted from the wheel as well.

The wheel view gives both the name and background image of the activity, which makes it fairly easy to quickly pick the one you are looking for. Switching to an activity brings up its "home screen" (an example activity is shown at left), which consists of various elements that have been connected to that activity. So there may be an "Application" window containing the programs that the user deemed important to that activity, a "Bookmark" window with relevant browser bookmarks, and so on. Various widgets can also be attached to an activity for things like notes, clocks, weather, etc.

The elements (windows, widgets) on the activity home screen can be moved around, scrolled, and resized in the obvious ways (obvious to other touch interface users anyway). There are some constraints on the sizes and positions of the elements so that they do not overlap, but the size/position is also limited to a fairly coarse grid. That makes sense for touch-oriented interfaces, but may seem a little too rigid to some. The activity screen itself is not limited in the vertical direction, though, and can be scrolled to access further real estate as needed.

Applications

Applications can be run either from an activity's list or from the launch area. Pulling down the "Peek and Launch" bar (which lives at the top of the screen and contains status icons for battery, network, and others, along with some control elements) will expose a live view of the currently running applications that can be switched to with a touch. Pulling the bar down further exposes the launch area (seen at right), which displays various applications that can be started. As might be guessed, additional running applications or launchable applications can be accessed by swiping the appropriate area to the right or left.

Applications generally run in full-screen mode, which makes sense for a tablet interface even if it still feels strange to curmudgeons like me who are used to seeing more than one application at once. There are various ways to navigate away from a running application. The first is the running-application-panel mentioned above, which can also be used to quit any running application by touching its close icon. Another method is to touch the activities icon in the far upper right corner, which returns you to the current activity's home screen (and leaves the application running in the background). It is a little difficult to get used to, but is fairly straightforward to use once you do.

There are three other icons in the upper right, corresponding to another central idea in Plasma Active: share, like, and connect (SLC). The idea is that compliant applications will be able to offer ways to share (via social media, email, etc.), like (ratings, favorites, ..), or connect (to an activity or calendar event for example) their content. So a user could connect a web site to one of their activities, share a photo with one of their friends (or many of them via a web service), rate a particular document for use in desktop searches, etc. Currently, though, few applications have added SLC functionality.

Many applications work quite well under Plasma Active One, including Firefox, LibreOffice Math, Marble, and others. While those applications are not targeted at touchscreen interfaces, it is still fairly easy to use them (though typing can be painful, see below). The Kontact Touch applications on the other hand have been written with touchscreens in mind. Things like the calendar and contacts applications were very easy to use and seemed to have all of the functionality that one is used to from, say, the equivalent Android apps.

Some glitches

A touchscreen keyboard is available for text entry, though it suffers from many of the same annoyances that other implementations do. It sometimes pops up in places that cover the text entry field—as it did for searching applications in the screen shot at left—though it can be shifted to the top or bottom of the screen using the arrow icon. It is not really suitable for anything other than entering short text. That's a limitation of the tablet form factor, but the Ideapad does have a hardware keyboard which makes things a bit easier. The on-screen keyboard does show each key value as it is pressed, but the reaction time seemed slow. It also doesn't always pop up or disappear at the right times. For someone whose normal interface to a computer is largely through the keyboard, it was irritating, but that may be partially due to the curmudgeon effect.

There were a number of other glitches that I observed with the three different versions (the two live-USB versions and the installed openSUSE version) of Plasma Active One that I tried. Some may be attributable to the hardware (CPU, graphics, touchscreen) of the Ideapad, but likely others are bugs of one sort or another. The image viewer was flaky (at least in the openSUSE versions, the MeeGo version worked fine), the updates of the running application view would sometimes get out of sync when closing applications, sometimes multiple tries were needed to activate an icon or button, the calendar has an irritating habit of popping up when trying to swipe the Peek and Launch bar (the time, which brings up the calendar, is dead center in the bar), and so on. Those kinds of problems are to be expected in a first release, and many are undoubtedly fixed in more recent development versions. Plasma Active is by no means complete—or completely working—but it is an impressive start.

What's most interesting about Plasma Active is that it has taken its own path. Rather than adopt one of the existing touchscreen interfaces, or picking and choosing the "best" parts of Android/iOS/webOS/etc., KDE has come up with its own paradigms for Plasma Active. As more folks start to use it, the interface may change down the road—something that's already been seen between some early demos at the Desktop Summit in Berlin and the current version. Free software is often accused of being imitative, and not innovative, but KDE and the Plasma Active team cannot be pinned with that label here. Whether one likes Plasma Active or not, it is certainly a bold step in an interesting direction.