Plasma/Active/Development/Tasks

Contributing

If you would like to support and become part of the Plasma Active team, you can use the following list of open tasks as inspiration. Please pick one of these tasks, for questions, you can always get in touch with us.

On Screen Keyboard

Status: 0%

Not started.

User Story

When there is a text edit area on screen, it should be possible to enter new text and edit the text that is there using the on screen keyboard. Touching a text edit area brings up the keyboard. It should be possible to use multiple keyboard layouts; access numbers, symbols and accented letters; avoid covering the editing area, etc.

Why this is important

Without a keyboard, text input is impossible; the better the keyboard is, the better the text input experience will be and given that this is an extremely common use case is an important item.

Proposed implementation

1) Write a keyboard layout description file to QML converter which would, using the Maliit keyboard layout descriptions and the C++ library to access them the Maliit project has written. This would give us a set of QML files that can be loaded directly into a keyboard shell, and this QML should use Plasma Qt Components

2) Write a Maliit plugin that loads these QML files and provides integration with things such as switching layouts, etc.

This will get us support for non-Qt apps, edit area avoidance, ability for apps to request specific layout types and other advanced features for "free". It will add a Maliit dependency, however. The Maliit developers have been extremely supportive and open so far, and we are holding monthly meetings with them.

Task Details

Owned by: Aaron Seigo Effort Estimation: 4 Task dependencies: None.

Unify suspend and shutdown with lock screen

Status: 90%

Implementation complete and working. Needs improved artwork for widgets on lock screen, power button applet on panel should be removed and screenlocker branch needs merging into master of kde-workspace.

User Story

When finished using the device (which may have been 5 minutes or hours of usage), it is desirable to put the device to sleep to save the battery. In certain cases, such as when a download or other background process is ongoing and / or the time between usage is expected to be short, then it is desirable to just lock device rather than sleep it. If usage is not expected for quite some time (e.g. overnight or longer) where charging will not be possible, it can be more desirable to actually turn the device off altogether and so a shutdown option is required. A single, elegant interface for these functions will be provided.

Why this is important

Lock, sleep and shutdown are critical end-of-usage modes that people in different scenarios will need. Making these features easy to get to and easy to understand and use will make every end-of-use experience more pleasant.

Proposed implementation

• On the QML based, lock screen add two sliders: one for Sleep and one for

Shutdown. The sleep slider will appear in the top left and shutdown in the top right, aligned vertically with the clock.

• Upon locking, the sleep slider will start moving slowly on its own towards

the "activate" position. User intervention will stop the slider, thereby cancelling the automatic sleep. This also gives the user feedback as to how long until the device actually sleeps when it locks (e.g. automatically after lack of usage)

• The Shutdown slider will only trigger if the user actually interacts with

it. If the user starts sliding it, the auto-sleep will be cancelled.

• This would also be a good opportunity to move the lock screen into ksmserver

itself, getting rid of the separate daemon that exists only for locking.

Task Details

Owned by: Aaron Seigo Effort Estimation: 2 Task dependencies: None.

Unexplored

Default Configuration

• KWallet configuation -> passwordless and no questions for access

Activity screen

• Custom titles for widgets, and a way for applets to set custom titles

Panel

• Put application systray icons after status icons

Panel

• hardcoded positions of containments (panel containment)
• hardcoded positions of slc and clock (systray)

Javascript Setup

• Ability to load initial widgets positions with a Javascript (ala Plasma Desktop Scripting)

Launcher

• Show most used / favorites as first line on first page

Braindumps

SLC

• Better artwork: connect icon is very odd
• Not matter what is touched, Connect is always shown: probable touch screen bug: the touch event arrives always in the same coordinates unless a connected usb mouse is moved-> actually old qgraphicsview bug: occurs also in the desktop taskbar group menus, partially fixed
• Bigger target invoking popup, and implement dragable
• Show title of URI to be operated on in the context menu

Window Management

• OpenGL ES on MeeGO

Application workflow

• Not obvious where apps are
• Visual feedback between time when activity is selected and when the activity appears (so we know something is actually happening)

Window Strip

• Window sorting
  • find solution to get at methods Martin added to kdelibs/*/kworkspace MRU
  • Put new windows after the current window
• Show windows from current activity only
• Sticky windows and moving windows across activities (SLC?)

Active Browser

• search in page
• save-as menus (e.g. for images)
• "back" repositions page to last viewed position
• plugin support -> 100% depends from qtwebkit i.e. flash tries to work, but doesn't really ;)
• display ssl status
• accepting non-verifiable SSL certs
• connect downloaded files to the activity (nepomuk bug)

Image viewer

• nicer ui
• possibility to browse sd cards/download/upload images
• search ui
• albums?

Multimedia

• Create multimedia activity
• Good touch volume applet
• Mediaplayer (minitube? bangarang? tomahawk? Plasma Mediacenter components?)
• Webcam (kamoso?)

Social Networks

• touch-friendly configuration for PIM (email, contacts, events.)
• touch-friendly setup of Facebook via Akonadi
• touch-friendly setup of Google via Akonadi
• Akonadi model for QML plasmoids
• Plasma QML widgets for
  • Contacts
  • Messages
  • Events

Workspace

• Dynamic switching of Plasma workspace types, eg from the display manager, or due to hardware events such as docking?

KDM

• Touch friendly login screen for eg touchscreen all-in-one PCs to use (low priority; we have auto-login)

Tools

• Make Plasmate release-ready
  • Improve editor for QML
  • Implement scripting console
  • Fix sizing problems in previewer

Documentation

• Improve installation docs
• Create user docs (pending UI freeze)

Goals and Larger Ideas for Future Releases

• Geolocation
  • Document and complete API
  • Use geolocation in more widgets
  • Cache geolocation
• libplasma2 & QSceneGraph port
• test GLES backend for kwin
• DBusmenu implementation in QML
• KToolBar replacement in QML (using a KActionCollection)
• KXmlGui actions access in QML
• KConfig integration with ownCloud
• Continue/finish porting KDE applications to the mobile build profile (mostly removing deprecated calls)