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Seigo: Plasma.next()?Seigo: Plasma.next()?Posted Jan 29, 2013 18:41 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784)In reply to: Seigo: Plasma.next()? by aseigo Parent article: Seigo: Plasma.next()?
Plasma Active is for consumer devices, such as (but not exclusively) tablets. Plasma Desktop is for full on desktop systems. You do realise that you're suffering from the same branding affliction as Microsoft here? On the one hand, having a well-known brand (Plasma) that gets mentioned all the time means that you can build on its supposed popularity, but then it also means that when you try and add qualifiers to it (Active, Desktop, Workspaces) to differentiate between potentially completely different things, you also have to make sure that everyone is able to keep up with those naming decisions and also to remember what all those names mean in the first place. People likely to care what Microsoft Office is are also likely to remember because the labelling is obvious. Using "Active" as a qualifier is going to challenge people's memory because it's vague and sounds like you've branched out into breakfast cereals. That's why people are getting confused about what you're offering and what you're changing. Using totally different or memorably distinct names helps to keep things separate, but the cost is that you perhaps lose mindshare: people may not realise that the same people are involved in some new thing you're doing. In fact, not using brand umbrellas like KDE or Plasma keeps everyone honest because developers then have to sell a project on its own merits and not lean on brand reputation. And, of course, nobody feels threatened because it looks like their favourite project is going off in some new and weird direction when it's actually something else that's doing so. To make this smoother, in Plasma Active, activities are front and center (and not particularly optional, though you can stick with just 1 if you care to) and we use metadata information extensively. When looking at photos, I probably want all the photos associated with a given activity (e.g. a vacation activity, or a party activity, or a project activity..) or with a given bit of metadata (such as a tag, or perhaps a geographical location). By the way, I use tagging quite a bit for managing photos, but I use hierarchies extensively for other content, too. Activities, however, as they are in KDE 4 (or whatever the full brand-plus-product name is) seem to be a confusing, orthogonal-to-workspaces demonstration of a concept not fully exercised or delivered. Are there any compelling examples of activities online?
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Seigo: Plasma.next()? Posted Jan 30, 2013 10:10 UTC (Wed) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link]
> when you try and add qualifiers to it (Active, Desktop, Workspaces) to
> differentiate between potentially completely different things,
ah, but they aren't completely different things. they different primary interface paradigms that use the same core concepts (e.g. Activities) and even many of the same UI components.
they are different faces to the same software, with the differences being driven by the physical form factor being targeted.
> you also have to make sure that everyone is able to keep up with those
those involved on the technical side, yes.
my blog is intended for a technical audience, so ... :)
> because developers then have to sell a project on its
leaning on brand reputation is how one builds on earned reputation. starting from scratch each time is absolutely insane. neither the customer nor the producer wins with that strategy.
the time to depart from existing brands is when the product departs (in function or focus). this is not the case here, however, as Plasma was designed from the get-go for this multi-UI-shared-logic approach.
> a confusing, orthogonal-to-workspaces demonstration of a concept not
> nobody feels threatened because it looks like their favourite project is
in this particular case, i'd rather deal with people being concerned about their favorite project going off in some new and odd direction than have a group of connected technologies communicated as if they are not. we have to pick our poison here.
i'm happy to correct people's misconceptions as they arise, and over time people will grok the concepts fully.
we're trying to shift the perception of what a desktop shell UI can and should be .. and we know that takes time, education and communication. trying to route around it by adjusting our communication to fit the current (mis)conceptions will not accomplish that.
it is the interrelated nature of the various Plasma Workspaces that grants
> the technology one of its most significant value propositions.
when we started with Activities, nobody else had really explored this idea. even in academia, relevant concepts were poorly developed: integration with the core shell wasn't well examined and proposed UI concepts were often overly complex (management in 3D, with a large gesture vocabulary, complex boolean constructions). so we were starting from scratch with little to guide us.
rather than spend 3-4 years behind closed doors as most proprietary projects do, we worked in the open. we ran into numerous obstacles; some technical, some related to design decisions.
over time we approached the design concept seen is Plasma Active, in which activities are seamlessly integrated, highly accessible and easy to grok. this was based on the work done in Desktop; so it is in a way an "activities 2.0" :)
the next phase of Activity development on the Desktop is to take the lessons learned in Active and fold them back into Desktop.
at the end of that (stepwise) process, i hope we will all be able to say that the concept will come through clearer and be easier to use.
hopefully that helps clear up the history a bit so you can understand why the feature presentation is where it is, and where we are going with it.
> Are there any compelling examples of activities online?
Plasma Active is entirely driven by activities. The exact same ones as used in Plasma Desktop. It's the same daemons behind the scenes, in fact: kactivitymanagerd (+ optionally Nepomuk). So that's a fairly good example.
There are also numerous articles online about activities; google provides a good number when searching for "plasma activities", such as this one: http://hanschen.org/2011/02/04/activities-a-change-in-wor...
(randomly selected .. :)
Seigo: Plasma.next()? Posted Jan 30, 2013 15:35 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] leaning on brand reputation is how one builds on earned reputation. starting from scratch each time is absolutely insane. neither the customer nor the producer wins with that strategy. Leaning on brand reputation is trading on that reputation but not always building on it. What would have happened if KDE 4 had been called something else? People would have been obliged to consider it more on its merits than on its connection with the KDE brand, which might not have been a good thing for the developers because it wouldn't have automatically directed an audience to that product, but then again people would have been obliged to reset their expectations, which would actually have been a good thing for all concerned. Starting from scratch is a brave thing for developers to do, what with needing to work hard to persuade people of the merits of the software itself, when the alternative is to capture everyone upgrading from one release to the next. when we started with Activities, nobody else had really explored this idea. Really? If you ignore the way people use virtual desktops, there are plenty of examples of grouping content and functionality by activity, at least beyond general window and desktop content management. The most ancient form is the spreadsheet and the use of separate files or sheets to organise different things (albeit with fairly restricted functionality on offer even with object embedding available), but you also find Web-based content management systems like Wiki sites providing activity-specific resources and employing tools that allow people to move beyond the application-centred view and towards a content-centred view that necessitates the integration of different applications or tools. In fact, the way that Web applications often integrate different kinds of functionality in the same view is precisely the kind of thing that presumably inspired things like Microsoft Active Desktop, Netscape Constellation and, of course, Plasma. There are also numerous articles online about activities; google provides a good number when searching for "plasma activities", such as this one: http://hanschen.org/2011/02/04/activities-a-change-in-workflow/ I don't think the author makes a good pitch for activities, really. He says, "With activities you can associate a particular window with more than one activity." You could do that already with virtual desktops in KDE 3, to the point where you can choose which desktops can see the window in KDE 3.5. I accept that using the term "activities" makes things easier to explain to people, but then you can argue that using that name for virtual desktops would solve that problem. Certainly, the toy examples I see given about making new activities for every single thing you do aren't going to scale, although I accept that if you do need another workspace it's easier than going into the configuration and adding one. Having both activities and virtual desktops is confusing. The article seems to advocate one desktop and many activities, stating that you could have many desktops within an activity if you needed that, but then you're navigating some kind of maze just to find that window you were using. When I tried KDE 4 (Plasma Desktop?) recently, the workspace and pager functionality was so poor (minimised windows didn't appear in the panel at all, and the workspace indicator just showed two blank panels), I started to think that one reason for people being persuaded to use activities was that the other functionality just isn't usable any more, sad to say. I think that activities are obviously an interesting idea and are widely used and proven already in other domains, but I don't think they appear as usable as the existing features for doing this kind of thing in KDE unless the audience is primarily people who need to be told how to organise their work. That would explain the photo activity which, if I were to find a comparable implementation of the concept in another medium, would be similar to having a simple Web photo gallery application, but even with a richer user interface toolkit available the usability just wasn't at the level I would expect: the navigation controls kept jumping around as the picture went from portrait to landscape and back again, and the picture needed resizing in a sometimes complicated set of user interface gestures.
Seigo: Plasma.next()? Posted Jan 30, 2013 17:21 UTC (Wed) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link]
> What would have happened if KDE 4 had been called something else
then we would not have been responsible for the results, and after things shook out and came right we'd now be left with a recognized brand (KDE) with not relation to what we're actually working on.
what you're suggesting is forking our own community.
> people would have been obliged to reset their expectations
a) that would not have happened as we were no longer maintaining the old code base, so it would be pure smoke and mirrors and our user base would have seen through that in a moment's notice
b) we would have lost countless more users due to the resulting confusion
c) it's good for the product if the group behind it takes responsibility for it. that means putting your name to it. like IBM did with the mainframe and Boeing did with the 747.
> Starting from scratch is a brave thing for developers to do
which is not what we did, btw. yes, the desktop shell got rewritten. everything else was a port. (including many pieces of the workspace itself: from kdm and kwin to various workspace libraries)
> what with needing to work hard to persuade people of the merits of the
we had to do that with 4.0 release, despite using the KDE brand :)
people are not nearly as sheeplike as you seem to think
> If you ignore the way people use virtual desktops
Activities are not spatial grouping. they aren't content grouping. they aren't limited to grouping at all. we utilize grouping visually in various areas of the Activity presentation, but grouping is not the core concept.
rather it's about contextual relatedness: given what $PERSON is doing in $PLACE at $TIME, what should the computer be doing?
a very simple example that steps outside the bounds of content grouping: when i switch to my Presentations activity, the power management settings on my laptop change appropriately.
or: when i switch activities on my tablet, the people in my address book that "matter" change.
> I don't think the author makes a good pitch for activities, really.
you wanted a sales pitch. i thought you meant documentation. my bad.
> I don't think they appear as usable as the existing features for doing
and all the people who do use them and swear by them are .. what? i think we can agree they are not you. :) but if we step outside of "you" == "definition of usable", we find people actually getting use out of activities that they didn't have access to before.
personally, i don't try and argue with reality when it presents itself, nor do i feel the need to add interpretation on top of such results in order to measure value. "why do these people find activities so useful" is a very interesting philosophical question, and one that can drive future development, but "according to people who use them, activities are useful" and "plasma active's implementation of activities tests very well with the general public" is enough to get to "does the concept work?"
i absolutely will submit that we will find people who do not use them and do not WANT to use them. there are people who hate broccoli too (many/most because of an interesting genetic variation that allows them to taste a compound in broccoli as intensely bitter). so there is no point in arguing about universal perfectness. the question is: does it do well for the people and place it is found?
in the case of Plasma Desktop, you can freely ignore Activities, so it's an interesting discussion perhaps but moot. many do use them there and find great utility in them. they are still a work in progress there, not as far along as in Active (which had the benefit of starting with all our lessons learned from Desktop).
in the case of Plasma Active, they are a core part of the system .. and, thankfully for us, actually works in the hands of people using the devices. there are people who use Active every day. in that sense, we've moved past theory.
i'm not sure how much more there is to discuss given those data points.
> unless the audience is primarily people who need to be told how to
does a filing cabinet tell you how to organize papers? no. it's a tool to do so.
same with activities. they provide a set of mechanisms by which to create contextually relevant states of being for the machine. you are in control them. they do not tell you how to organize your work.
the original inspiration for activities came while watching a graphic designer tell the *computer* how to organize his work by manually moving files and app icons around between folders and the desktop in the most painful of mouse and keyboard ballets.
so rather than activities telling you how to organize your work, it grants you tools to tell the computer how you'd like to see your work (or play :) organized and handled.
> That would explain the photo activity
not really. that was put there as an example to get people started in a useful direction some releases ago, but it hardly scratches the surface (and was actually put there before we had a number of the current features available implemented). apparently it failed in its mission. :) that can be rectified with a simple git rm ...
Seigo: Plasma.next()? Posted Jan 31, 2013 0:27 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] What would have happened if KDE 4 had been called something elsethen we would not have been responsible for the results, and after things shook out and came right we'd now be left with a recognized brand (KDE) with not relation to what we're actually working on. I don't think you follow. There is a discontinuity between KDE 3 and KDE 4 in terms of technology and in terms of the developers involved, as I understand it. I get the impression that people didn't want to work on KDE 3 any more, but had KDE 3 been more actively maintained then it might have been inappropriate for KDE 4 to claim to be a continuation of that heritage. You can claim that most people involved with KDE development moved on and that they have the right to apply that label to whatever they subsequently do, and you can claim that this isn't confusing to the users if what they subsequently get meets their expectations based on what that group produced before, but those expectations are very high indeed: you only need to read the complaints about functionality regressions (or whatever people want to call them) to realise that. Moreover, as the various GNOME forks have shown, being in control of the brand doesn't mean that such a group is actually the best flag-bearer for continuing any traditions or fulfilling any expectations. b) we would have lost countless more users due to the resulting confusion Who would have lost users? That's my point: there's the idea that a new project automatically takes over the users of an old project because the new project uses the same name as the old one, but those users are using the old project, not the new one, and they don't belong to anyone. Who do GNOME 2's users "belong" to? Nobody. The only thing "lost" is the opportunity to convince people using a previous product to adopt the current one. Starting from scratch is a brave thing for developers to dowhich is not what we did, btw. yes, the desktop shell got rewritten. everything else was a port. (including many pieces of the workspace itself: from kdm and kwin to various workspace libraries) I was referring to branding the thing from scratch. I've had the argument about whether some heritage has been maintained in these exercises fairly recently, and many people seem to think that it's confusing to suggest an upgrade to an existing product when the result is actually a different product which can't provide feature parity with the previous one. Activities are not spatial grouping. they aren't content grouping. they aren't limited to grouping at all. we utilize grouping visually in various areas of the Activity presentation, but grouping is not the core concept. rather it's about contextual relatedness: given what $PERSON is doing in $PLACE at $TIME, what should the computer be doing? Isn't "contextual relatedness" just a fancy term for grouping? Or if "grouping" is too vague, how about "showing and doing common stuff in the same view"? I mean I get the examples about laptop settings and address books, and formalising these things is obviously overdue (particularly the former), but I still dispute that "nobody else had really explored this idea". I don't think the author makes a good pitch for activities, really.you wanted a sales pitch. i thought you meant documentation. my bad. Well, that article barely passes for documentation if that's what you think it is. I know that it's easy to label my misgivings as anecdotal and support from other sources as data points, and it may well be the case that "plasma active's implementation of activities tests very well with the general public" (source needed), but I'd like to know under what conditions. Were people given tuition or did they sit down and figure it out themselves? Were the people doing this in a dedicated period of time or as part of their normal routine? I'm not accusing anyone of deception but it's very easy to sell a particular story. Every day of late, I have been confronted with an advertisement that gives a supposedly objective assessment of the merits of a particular company's product in the form of a taste test - guess where the advertiser's product is placed in the ranking - and in my idle moments staring at it, it has become obvious how one would game this in several ways to encourage a certain outcome (and not even considering just running many surveys until one gets the "right" results). Maybe the testing accurately measures the perception of the target audience, but I'd definitely be worried about inadvertently reaching the "right" result and reinforcing an unfortunate strategy. Then again, I'm sure you've given this plenty of thought, so I guess there's nothing to be gained from giving it any further consideration.
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