Ok, this sounded a bit fancier than it is. This post is not about what the future phones might look like, but rather about something related to touch-based UIs (or to use the fancy term UX :)) that has bothered me for a while now.

Preamble: To be honest, I haven’t had much opportunity to use various touch devices apart from my Symbian S60v5, and I’ve played a bit with Androids. With that said, I have really no clue whether the ideas presented here are implemented somewhere, but I haven’t seen them.

Current gestures

This part is a bit ranty, so feel free to jump down to the next section. :)

When touch-based devices went world-wide, the most touted thing was how natural the UI was. Palm WebOS closes the apps when (IIRC) you drag them down, iOS uses pinch zooming, etc.

While I have nothing against these concepts, they work quite well, let us consider how natural those actually are.

• Get a pen and a notebook. When you finish writing, do you drag the notebook down from your desk? No, you close it, and put it away.
• Open your photo album, and take one photo out of it. Put it on the table. Put your index finger in the centre and the thumb somewhere else on the photo. Try to zoom it by stretching.

So, please stop using the word natural and replace it with ‘intuitive’ (which, again, can be debatable, but can’t be considered as plain wrong).

Guided gestures

So, the gestures are useful to make some tasks quicker. The thing that I want to be able to do faster is to chose a contact and call it/send sms without the need to ‘click’ more than once. The gestures could be ‘drag contact up to call’, ‘drag contact down to send sms’. But that is not really intuitive.

Enter guides:

The picture mostly says it all, but here’s a short synopsis - you have your favourite contacts placed on the dashboard of some sorts. Every contact gets a size proportional to how much you did contact him/her. Other contacts are automatically added if you have unanswered calls from them, or sms messages.

When you touch the screen, the guides appear - in this case you have 4 actions - call (up), sms (down), info (right), more (left). If you want to send an sms, just move your finger down and release it.

Now, the same for the message list. Dragging up/down behaves as expected - list gets scrolled. But when you drag to left/right, you get two commonly used actions - ‘delete’ and ‘forward’ (replying is embedded in the bottom of the window - not shown in the picture).

When you touch one of the messages, you get the icon guides. When dragging the item to one of the sides, the icon for that action becomes less transparent, and so does the tooltip - as a visual indication of how much you need to drag the item to perform the desired action.

QML

Just to note that these are not mockups - all UI is implemented using QML - it is not yet connected to real data, but the widgets are as real as they get. :)

The FedoraTM story

I’ve made Fedora branded stripes to submit it for potential inclusion in F15. Unfortunately, Mairin (the famous Fedorartist) explained that wallpapers need to be published under a free license, and since mine contained Fedora logo, it can’t be (that is, Fedora logo is TMed).

So, because I didn’t want to really throw away what I made, I made it into a generic wallpaper dedicated to the infinity symbol. The nice thing is that due to the distortion, it still resembles an ‘f’, so for all you who requested a Fedora-branded Stripes, you can use this.

It is similar to the original Stripes with a bit stronger shade of blue.

Implications

This means that no further distro-branding will occur unless one of the following conditions are met:

• I get an official request
• The logo is published under GPL or similar license

For the second, if you use a distro that has it (for example, they ship with a replacement for a KDE icon that has a distro logo on the blue rectangle KDE logo used to be on), please give me a nudge.

Gnome 3 stripes

Well, I guess most of you saw screenshots of G3 and saw their version of stripes (the default wallpaper). It is fun that both KDE Stripes, and Gnome stripes were created (approximately) at the same time and (for me) truly represent the differences between KDE and Gnome artwork (like Oxygen icons vs Gnome’s).

Owl

I’ve got quite a few distro related requests. Some of them were made, some not yet. If you sent me a request, and you didn’t get the wallpaper, please send it again since I lost my mail archive.

I remember there was one distro with an owl as a logo, but I don’t remember the name :( … for others, I don’t even remember the logos.

I know it is a bit early to say this, but I wish you all an ECSTATIC NEW YEAR!

Click for full resolution

rant:

So, the Calligra announcement raised some eyebrows, and made big waves all across the world.

I guess you’ve seen a lot of articles lately that say things equivalent to “no more pasta with cheese and garlic, end of KDE?”. I guess it is /that/ time of the year again. When people have nothing to write about, they need to invent or /beautify/ the news.

And that, my children, that is called “journalism”.

The thing that always fascinated me is that people really like reading these things. You can’t imagine how many page hits I got when I posted a spoof of OS market share statistics with this post - “Linux and Firefox market share - the reality” (well, unfortunately, neither can I because my WP stats got wiped in the meantime, but it was rather big :) )

The conclusion: Orwell’s 1984 is not about communism and monitoring people…

p.s. I intentionally left out the links to the posts I’m referring to here, as they really don’t need any more publicity…

Ok, I’ve realized I really don’t have the time to finish some of the things I’ve started before. Too many things on my plate both in KDE world and outside.

Plasma themes

One of those was the promise of removing the fanciness from Plasma with ASCII art. The others include Glaze and Spoons themes.

Outsourcing

Because of this unfortunate situation, I’ve decided to give the theme creation up to the community. I’ve submitted the themes in question to gitorious at http://www.gitorious.org/kde-plasma-themes.

So, if you want to help, just clone the repository and start creating art. I would ask you not to fork the themes, but improve these ones - just make merge requests and I’ll accept them as soon as possible. Don’t forget to add yourself to the list of authors.

If you prove to be a serious contributor, you’ll get direct commit permissions to the whole repo.

git.kde.org

If you’re wondering why I didn’t use git.kde.org but Gitorious, the main reason is that the repo was created long before git.kde.org was even in plans, and I just haven’t blogged about it.