{"id":206,"date":"2011-09-02T00:28:38","date_gmt":"2011-09-01T23:28:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/?p=206"},"modified":"2011-09-02T12:57:49","modified_gmt":"2011-09-02T11:57:49","slug":"first-plasma-active-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/?p=206","title":{"rendered":"First Plasma Active experience"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/layt.net\/john\/\">John Layt<\/a> recently blogged about his adventure with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.layt.net\/john\/blog\/odysseus\/tablet_fun_and_games\">having children<\/a> use <a href=\"http:\/\/community.kde.org\/Plasma\/Active\">Plasma Active<\/a> with quite some success.<\/p>\n<h3>The task<\/h3>\n<p>I was this evening out at a board meeting in my <a href=\"http:\/\/b21b.dk\">local scout group<\/a>, and for such a event you of course need the following<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Agenda<\/li>\n<li>Treasures report<\/li>\n<li>Minutes from last meeting<\/li>\n<li>Various other papers<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;ve heard from various people that an iPad is great for such meetings, and produces much less paper waste, so of course, I wanted to try with my brand new Plasma Active tablet.<\/p>\n<h3>Before meeting<\/h3>\n<p>So before meeting: Charge tablet &#038; fetch needed documents.<br \/>\nPossible issues: Everything was on a my imap server. Minutes was a plain text file, Agenda was a docx file, treasures report was a xls spreadsheet, and the various other papers were pdf files.<\/p>\n<p>For fetching, I&#8217;ve heard a lot about Kontact Touch and everything using <a href=\"http:\/\/akonadi-project.org\">Akonadi<\/a>. Besides me not being fully able to properly enter my password in the first 10 tries, and a sometimes flaky internet connection, everything here was a breeze.<\/p>\n<p>To the three first documents, the answer was &#8216;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.calligra-suite.org\">Calligra<\/a> Mobile&#8217;. Rendered even the docx file better than libreoffice did. And Calligra Mobile was nice and touch friendly and worked pretty well for this. There is also something called &#8216;Calligra Active&#8217;, which is supposed to be way cooler, but still misses at least one essential feature to be used for a touchscreen only. It can only open documents passed to it on command line. And I&#8217;m not yet very comfortable with a onscreen keyboard.<\/p>\n<p>For the last, there was <a href=\"http:\/\/okular.kde.org\">Okular<\/a>. The desktop edition of Okular. I was impressed by *how* usable Okular were for a touch screen device. A quick and dirty edition of a mobile Okular could probably be done with &#8216;remove all toolbars and menubars and such&#8217; and &#8216;if no file is passed on command line, then open a file selector window and open selected file&#8217;, which shouldn&#8217;t take a person knowing the Okular code much time. But that&#8217;s still just the &#8216;Quick and dirty edition&#8217;<\/p>\n<h3>During&#8230;<\/h3>\n<p>And during the meeting, everything worked flawlessly, except the internet on site, so I was happy I had prepared in advance. As a extra bonus, Plasma Active offered the nice <a href=\"http:\/\/games.kde.org\/\">KDE Games<\/a>, as John Layt also mentioned, for the parts of the meeting where it was a bit boring.<\/p>\n<p>So. At least for me and in this case, Plasma Active did its job, at least to a A. And it is still described as Alpha software.<\/p>\n<h3>Issues<\/h3>\n<p>There is, though, a few important usability issues:<\/p>\n<p><strike>For QWidget based applications, oxygen&#8217;s nice desktop feature of being able to move the application by dragging it from almost everywhere is just completely useless on a touch screen device when you are only using full screen applications. Luckily, oxygen-settings can disable this.<\/strike><\/p>\n<p><strong>Update:<\/strong> People tells me that this has already been fixed.<\/p>\n<p>The Network Manager Plasma Widget, in case of &#8216;no network&#8217;, is very hard to &#8216;activate&#8217; in order to select a network. A bit larger touch area here would be very nice. Currently, it feels like it is only slightly larger than a dot:\u00c2\u00b7.<\/p>\n<h3>Future<\/h3>\n<p>Oh boy, I&#8217;m looking forward for Plasma Active getting to Beta or RC status. Or Final!<\/p>\n<p>And btw, I&#8217;m looking for a job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Layt recently blogged about his adventure with having children use Plasma Active with quite some success. The task I was this evening out at a board meeting in my local scout group, and for such a event you of course need the following Agenda Treasures report Minutes from last meeting Various other papers I&#8217;ve [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-kde"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":214,"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions\/214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pusling.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}