tastes like candy

Hi, everyone!

It’s been a while since I don’t post anything, and that’s mostly because of the university – it is giving me a lot of  annoying headaches. When you get to the end of the course, there are somethings that you just can’t handle anymore, like exams. And also, now I’m working too (yey! : ), so it gives me too little time to do stuff that I like.

Every time when I have spare time, though, I try to work on the development of the widget explorer and it’s integration with plasma – actually the last time I did that was last weekend… I did some useful commits, but now I’m kind of in the middle of too many exams and projects at university, so I can’t do much. Sorry . Aaron is the guy who’s helping me out with this, so, Aaron, thanks, you’re the man (ps: please pong me at irc someday)!

Anyways! It’s been a while since I’m working on a plasmoid idea and I think it’s time to share it with you.

It’s a pretty simple plasmoid that I’ve been developing since the GSoC period (well, I didn’t have much time to work with it, since I had a GSoC project to accomplish), and now I’m getting it finally done. I call it Type Tester.

I don’t know about you, but everytime I have to do a task that includes choosing a font type to some certain text, I takes me forever to do it! I copy and paste the phrase I want to change the font a few times and start changing its fonts. Looks like a quick task, but it’s not at all. Then I start comparing then, and deleting the ones I don’t really like, until there’s only one left! Stupid?!

I always thought about building a solution to this problem I have, and now I finally found the perfect solution: a plasmoid to test the fonts! It’s quick, simple, and harmless

The idea is simply to type a text, choose a font size and build a list with this text written with each of the fonts of the system. Here is a screenshot:

(ps: ignore those fonts I have – I installed them when I was little (yes, like 11 years old) and I didn’t know what I was doing back then : )

(ps2: I know, I still have to handle the resizes stuff!)

When clicking in the “-” sign, that font will dissapear of the list. For the future I want to be able to:

• do actions in batch, like erasing the selected ones, or erasing the not-selected ones
• change the text foreground and background
• change the number of fonts that appears on the list per page (tab)
• accept a font point size number input
• name the tabs with the first letter of the fonts names on that list (A / B / B..C / C / D..E).

If you like the idea and want to help me with new ideas, please do it

cheers!

Hello there!
It’s been a couple of days that i’ve been willing to write this post, but I hadn’t find enough time yet. Since I missed a lot of classes when I went to Tokamak3 (which, btw, was completely, totally worth it), my life at university has been crazy since I arrived here.

Well, to begin with, Tokamak3 was great – one of the most significant/exciting/pleasant/enriching experiences I’ve had. It is impressive how few people can get together and be so, so, so productive in so short time, and, at the same time, get along so well, having fun, laughing and being friends. Yes, it’s beatiful to see the friendship going on inside this community. They are all so cool!
Every single one that was there impressed me on your own specific way – each one with your peculiar personality, but all of you with your great technical skills (the same to you, Mario, with your cooking technical skills . That was quite inspiring to me, the fresh new member. Yes. That was VERY inspiring… …
Damn, I miss Tokamak!

Ok, but now for the news: after Tokamak3, the new widgets explorer is now merged with trunk! And now it is not the New Widgets Explorer anymore, is THE Widgets Explorer!

On the first day at Tokamak3, we all did a presentation about what we were going to work during the next days, and after that we wrote on postits the tasks we were going to accomplish during Tokamak. That was a pretty interesting idea, cause this way we could keep the track of our work, knowing what we have done and what’s left to be done.

Before going to Tokamak and writing my tasks, I compiled all the hints, criticism and ideas I’d received with my last post and discussed them with the people at the chalet. Some were incorporated, some were saved, some were not.

The first immediate idea was to solve a problem one pointed out: it isn’t so obvious that I have to drag and drop the applet to add it. Ok, I agree. So the solution was to change the mouse cursor to a little opened hand when hovering the icon, and changing it to a little closed hand when clicking on the icon. Nice and easy, huh? Task solved!

Another task was to highlight in the list, somehow, the already running applets. It’s nice to know what are the applets that you have running while browsing throught the list. The old widgets explorer had this functionality, but the indicator of running applets was “-” sign, which was also a button to delete those applets – this was pointed out to be an usability problem. The solution to that was to paint a “tick” blue sign on the left-bottom corner of the running applets icons. This “tick” sign is also the icon to the “running” categories, so the user knows what that tick means. Task solved!

Another set of tasks was to fix a few layout problems – I called it the crazy layouts, but now they are under control.
Task solved!

We also had some discussion about the problem of removing applets through the widgets explorer. How to do that? If we had some kind of remove button for each icon of running applet in the list, then we would go back to the problem of the old widget explorer: the remove button simply removes ALL of the widgets, which is not nice and not expected. And if we had a remove something for each single plasmoid of every desktop, than we would maybe get to an usability issue. The solution, then, was to not implement this functionality inside the widget explorer. To remove a plasmoid you can simply remove it through the plasmoid handle.
Task solved!

Other interesting task was to find a way of showing the brand new kind of widgets: the remote ones (Rob’s summer project). The idea is simple: show the list of widgets that are available on the network. We find one solution that was: create a “remote widgets” category. But there are still a few questions to be answered: do I want to filter the remote widgets with categories too? If so, remote widgets can’t be a category itself. Do I wan’t the remote widgets to be showed among the local ones? Do we want to publish/unpublish widgets on the network through the widgets explorer? Ok, this question has been answered: no, we don’t. But now all we need to do is to answer these other questions and implement it. Task partially solved!

The most polemic non-technical task was to figure out a better way of displaying the vertical version of the widget explorer. There is something not right with the list of categories… And no, we DON’T want a combobox! Aaron came with the idea of a “kind of” combobox, that expands with mouse hover, and doesn’t hide when choosing a category (cause a combobox hides after selection), so we can filter quickly more than once in a row. How about that? Actually, after writing it down, I found it a very nice idea! I can already visulize it, it’s a new better kind of combobox that may actually work. But I open it for suggestions. Any?! Ok, this task was not solved.

I think we’ve reached the last task: merge the widget explorer with plasma! This is the most important task – put the widget explorer inside the panel controller. Yes, that was where we were going to begin the merge – clicking add widgets on the panel controller, the widgets explorer would appear. Aaron helped me out with the beggining of the task, and then the most time of Tokamak was spent to make this merge work. I was facing a lot of layout, dinamic resizing problems, but the task to put the explorer inside the panel controller was solved! You can build trunk and test it But there are still quite a few tasks to be done to make it usable and prettier. And we still have to figure out and make it work when right-clicking on desktop and when calling the up-right corner button to reach “add widgets”.

There is a list of remaining tasks to be accomplished and i’m going to quickly list them.
Feel free to add some to this list

• Put a “close” and “back” button on the widget explorer
• Make the panel controller wider when clicking on “add widgets” (so the icons won’t appear too small)
• Maybe make it possible to the user to resize the widget explorer
• List the remote widgets
• Make it possible to uninstall an applet through the widget explorer
• Figure out the whole vertical list
• Make it work when right-clicking on desktop and when calling the up-right corner button to reach “add widgets”
• The arrows button looks disabled, I know (with air, at least). Need to figure that out.
• How about making the panel controller a little more translucent?
• Yes, I know the name of the applet is clipped, I’mma fix it
• put an info button inside the plasmoids handle to show more info about the plasmoid (author, version, etc), since we removed it from the widget explorer.

Well, I guess that’s it. There’s a lot going on and I’m very happy with the work we are doing with the widget explorer, and the progress we made in Tokamak! Let’s keep working and, please, if everyone wants to help, do it (there is a lot helping already, I just want to make it clear . With ideas, hints, coding, code hints, and so on.
We have to make it work to 4.4

Oh! I forgot to mention: also during Tokamak 3 I received a very good news! I was accepted as a Speaker on Latinoware 2009 (http://www.latinoware.org) ! My presentation there will be about my GSoC experience, aiming the ways of gathering/working/developing UX in such a “spread” way as Open Source Projects are. It was so nice to see my name on the speakers list (http://www.latinoware.org/node/40) ! Hope to make it well and to see some of you there!
(what about a quick kde sprint while we are there?!

And I’d like to finish this post by thanking KDE e.V. and the whole KDE community for every single opportunity on the past few months. You guys _really_ rock!

See ya!

Hello, everyone!
It’s been a while since I don’t post anything, and very sorry for that. You soon will find out my possible reasons (or maybe some excuses).

This week the GSoC season ended and I am here with my first of the last posts about the GSoC

First of all, I’d like to thanks everyone that made it possible and made it beautifully – including gsoc team, kde/plasma community, the qt labs america guys and, of course, Ivan, my dear, patient mentor. Thanks you all.
This was, and I really mean it, one of the most significant experiences I had – I managed to overrun myself in several aspects, since the first day I joined the kde community. Besides all the technical learning, I managed to keep a nice long-distance relationship with lots of people, and find a perfect virtual environment to work. It’s being just great.

Well, as you must know, I am working with the New Widgets Explorer, and this particular project also brought me lots of learning.

One of the most difficult tasks I had to deal with was to conceive the new UI & funcionalities of the project, and that started even before coding time began.

The Widget’s Explorer is an everyday tool for plasma users, so almost everyone that uses it has a strong opinion about it – likes, dislikes, how things should or shouldn’t be. It is obviously very hard to please everyone, since we’re all so different. I had to be prepared to hear lots of criticizes!

My first attempt to do the right thing was to arrange a virtual focus group session with plasma users – I tried my best to gather different kinds of users: developers, designers and purely users. There were 12 people in the room, and the results were great! I could analyze a huge material and came out with some nice conclusions (you can see it in previous post).

My second step was to try to express the conclusions into mockups. I drew several ones, and finally published 2 options of mockups, which you can also see in previous post (the last one). The response to those was great. I heard a lot of criticizes, got a lot of help, lots of private e-mails and blog comments with suggestions. The final choice was to use one of the mockups and embrace some helpful criticizes.

So we were done for now with the mocks. Coding time begun! Yey!

Everything was going great and I was able to create a functional mockup-like (not so much alike) version of the project. I was very excited with that, mostly because of the huge learning.

But, as we know, it is hard to please everyone – the whole idea of the project (the UI aspect) was questioned and we decided to take it to another path.
First of all, this is a screeshot I took before changing paths (not the most up-to-date one, I had more stuff done – but this was a screenshot I luckly found here ) :

The new idea, though,  was to make it a long and linear list, horizontally attached to the panel – basically. So, after developing a great part of the project, I had to stop and make some other mocks.

This is one that could sketch, with the help of some community friends – the horizontal and vertical versions (yeah, vertical ’cause we needed to think about the case when the panel is on the right/left sides of the screen):

Some work was lost, and lots of hours of work were lost – more hours than code lines (those I could reuse), ’cause, as a begginer, I didn’t have the experience to code so many lines in few hours. But this whole re-working thing made me learn much more

The new idea/mockup for the project didn’t came out to public due a decision I made: I had to be able finish GSoC in time and I couldn’t be doing any back and forth work all the time (designing – coding – re-designing – re-coding) and I knew that there would be a long time of discussion over it if I did. I find this kind of discussion very productive, but I really had to finish GSoC. And, yey!, I did it!

I finally finished what we agreed to do after the whole scenario changing, and these are the screenshots of the final result
(screencasts later:)) :

There are both vertical and horizontal versions implemented. The categories are always visible, and tooltips holds more information about the applet, and also moves with animation like the plasma tooltips. The list moves with the arrows buttons and also with mouse wheel (faster with the mouse wheel). These tooltips were great idea – it can be a place for lots of stuff, like the screeshot of the applet, the number of running applets and its position in desktop…

Hopefully you’ll like it

But I am actually here to open up a space for every of you opine over it. Now that GSoC is over, I don’t mind doing back-and-forth job (for as much as it is better for the application ).

Of course there is still a lot of work to do, and I’m thrilled to raise our new child together with you!
The day after tomorrow we’re heading to Tokamak and I’m absolutely sure that the New Widgets Explorer will mature much more with those terrific guys (and girl )

Well, later I’ll have another post with screescasts and some other details

Well, here I am again!

Coding time is coming and I’m very excited about it. I’ve learned a lot this month and things are coming out great for me – I’m really liking the community, people are very, very nice, and also I have a very cool and responsible mentor

But today it’s about mockups!

In my tentative timeline I said I was going to do some mockups drawing and deliver it to the community approval, so we could built together the actual, real and beautiful mockup. So it’s time, right on time!

First of all, we came out with a list of functionalities the widgets explorer will have:

• List applets
• Filter by category
• Filter by most used (support of usage statistics)
• Drag and drop to add widget
• Support of emblems
• List kde-look widgets, download source widgets
• Install kde-look widgets
• Install from directory

These are the required functionalities. Of course desirable funcs can appear and be a part of it (some already appears in mockups). The great thing is that we were able to remove functionalities that weren’t used very much and then a more simple UI could be built.

I managed to draw 2 ideias to the widget explorer, where I tried to put all the functionalities, UI, usability concepts we extracted from focus group, and also others I studied. Some of these concepts were: no scrolling bar – instead we use navigation buttons to reveal pages; more information about widgets when navigating; categories always on, not hidden in combobox.

These are the drawings:

I talked to pinheiro (great kde designer) about the mocks, and he really enjoyed it, particulary the second one. He said we could go for it, but first we have to ask for the community approval. Once is decided, pinheiro said he could do the actual, real, beautiful mockup, like no one can do

When drawing the mocks, I represented the widgets as a little ball, as you can see. That would represent the widgets icons, actually. This icon issue was largely discussed at focus group, cause there is too many icons to be made, and too few designers to accomplish that. The truth be told: these icons are too cute to be discarted. So I thought: what if these icons were all little translucid plasma-like balls, with some content inside? I think the work of doing icons would be much easier and more people would be capable of doing it, since the content would be much simpler… I don’t know. It was just an ideia… Pinheiro agreed with me, though! “I can already imagine how it would like with little balls ” 

cute

well, I’m looking forward to hear your feedback!

Hey, you all. It’s been a week since our focus group session happened and I spend this week doing some analysis over it. I gotta tell you – it was a very productive meeting, with some very good ideas and discussions that should lead us to very good results! For the ones who asked, mockups are coming soon (don’t worry – designers will help me with that , but not now. I’m trying to follow my timeline strictly

Before I start talking about the results, I’d like to thanks to all of the 12 people who participated of the session:

MoRpHeUz, jeez__, guiocavalcanti, pinheiro, notmart, ivan_cukic, aseigo, cmarcelo, anselmosm, pinda, annieC, seele

Thanks for helping this matter!

Well, first of all, me and pinda had a script to follow during the session, with topics to guide us. Since those topics eventually changed courses along with the meeting, I’m going to write down the actual topics found in the discussion:

1. How often do you use the widgets explorer?
2. Do you find it useful? Why?
3. What do you feel about it?
4. Which functionalities do you use?
5. When you’re searching for widgets, what do you do?
6. What do you feel about this search mechanism and the way the widgets are listed?
7. Which functionalities bothers you?
8. What usability problems do you feel about the current widget explorer?
9. And what about functionalities issues?
10. There are a lot of ways remote widgets can possibly be displayed in the add new widgets dialog. What way do you think is most comfortable to use?
11. I understand this question concerns a feature that doesn’t exist yet, but just try imagine having that possibility. Where would you expect them to be? Like in a seperate tab/category? mixed with other widgets with a different emblem? structured by computer that shares them?
12. But what do you think? Consider each other machines like a seperate categories? Have one category
    ‘plasmoids near you’? Have a tree-view like thingy that structures widgets under the computer that shares them?
13. Terminology for this widgets-over-network feature: what do you think a good name
    would be for accessing a widget this way?
14. Take a look at these mockups and talk about it:
    http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Plasma+-+Add+Widgets+Mockup?content=101423
    http://blusrcu.ba/nookie/?p=22

The topics 10 to 13 where pinda’s topics. We made analysis of those to, but pinda is the one who’s gonna explain that to you.

Below are 2 mindmaps of the focusgroup results. I put it in short topics for a quick understanding of the session (for those with no courage to read everything )

This one sums up the discussion about the current widgets explorer and mockups

This one were the ideas that appeared when discussing the current widgets explorer and mockups

Ok, so I’m going to analyze topic by topic.

1 – How often do you use the widgets explorer?

2 – Do you find it useful? Why?

That would be pretty obvious to say that the widgets explorer is used only when there’s the need to add widgets. It became clear, thought, that’s not an everyday/very often used tool – but it’s still very important and useful. The main point is that the tool is used in a low frequency and for supposed quick tasks.

3 – What do you feel about it?

As known, the current widgets explorer doesn’t satisfy much – seems that it doesn’t answer to it’s purpose. Incredibly, even being a not-very-often-used tool, it can bothers users pretty much – everyone at the focus group session.  So much it makes one wanna kill it.

<@annieC> and what do you feel about it?

<+pinheiro> the usuall “kill, kill, die, die

Widgets explorer seems to be poor to the users – it has a lack of plasmoids info [jeez__], no organization and very annoying ugliness [pinheiro]. A bit flat list doesn’t please anymore [notmart].

4 – Which functionalities do you use?

This topic was about raising the most used functionalities of the tool and keeping in mind that those should be treated more carefully.

The first functionality remembered at the session was the drag and drop. The “add widget” functionality is discarded with the possibility of dragging and dropping the plasmoid. [notmart] exposes that he uses drag and drop specially because it puts the widget exactly where he wants. [jeez__] said, though, that he took sometime to realize he could dnd the plasmoid – an usability issue observed that maybe can tell us something.

There was a conflict about the “favorites” functionality. Some says it doesn’t make much sense, others don’t use it much, others don’t use it at all. [pinheiro_] brought a strong opinion when said that he tend to prefer “most used” categories rather than favorites, since the “most used” list is made automatically.

5 – When you’re searching for widgets, what do you do?

With this topic, things can get a little confused. [ivan_cukic] said that he searched by “favorites” – functionality barely used be others – “most used” and by typing the name. He said he doesn’t really uses categories.
It became clear that most of them uses the search field, either to search for functionality or to search by name.
The categories are ignored by most of them – some said because it’s hidden under a combo box. [cmarcelo] thinks, though, that the use of categories could be nice to discover new widgets, even though he doesn’t use this search mechanism.

6 – What do you feel about this search mechanism and the way the widgets are listed?
7 – Which functionalities bothers you?

There were a few issues that can be listed under this 2 topics:
- search field doesn’t work well – seems that the search for widgets by typing the desired functionality doesn’t work. Since it doesn’t work, people try to guess the widgets names and type it.
- The categories options are hidden
- The category of a widget isn’t always the right one – the “most used” category, though, is used and seems to please everyone
- There isn’t much information about a listed widget

Within this topic, when discussing about the “categories” issue, the concept of tagging widgets came up. [notmart] was the first to bring it up when saying

categories are not much descriptive because there are just one, a mechanism like tags would be more neat.

A couple of people agreed strongly with the ideia of tags, but the idea wasn’t develop within this topic anymore.

When discussing the last issue of the list (not much information about a widget), [cmarcelo] brought up the following:

I think having more information about the plasmoid (or at least make it possible). Having an easy way to preview (screenshot or live preview) directly on the list… This makes discovering easy IMHO.

This statement brought a whole other discussion.
It can be listed a few topics discussed about this issue:
- Live preview of the plasmoid can be quite challenging
- Preview could be a requirement for widgets developers.  “provide a screnie of your plasmoid” [pinheiro]
- Screenshots would also solve the problems and doesn’t seem really hard to get it
- We could have both: screenshots and live previews.
. If the developer provides a screenshot, use it, if he doesn’t, use live preview [jeez__]
. Use the screenshots and maybe a desktop file config key that says it supports live preview [notmart]
. Screenshots of the already used widgets, so it would be more recognizable to the user

[seele] brought, then, the important question:

where would that screenshot be displayed?

Some discussed using the previews instead of the icons, but it was noticed by [seele] herself that the thumbnails area is too small and the preview would lose a lot of details. It could be, though, exposed on a mouseover tooltip – a little larger tooltip.

This topic was finished here, but, at the end of the focusgroup session, [aseigo] entered and made an important statement about the preview/screenshots matter:

however … screenshots can be hard to see at small sizes and decent icons tend to be just as effective”,  “and esp as themes change, i’d hate to have to update screenshots all the time.

8 – What usability problems do you feel about the current widget explorer?

The first topic brought in this topic was the idea of hiding the widget explorer on drag and drog, so the plasmoid could reach more space of the desktop on the drop. The idea seemed to please most of them.
The second issue brought was the confusion about the contextual controls and global controls of the “add” and “remove” widgets. [seele] made a good statement about it:

Currently you select an item from a list and click the add widgets global button, but to remove it, you use the contextual remove button in the item. The separation of complementary controls is confusing – you would expect the controls to be grouped together.

That means: to add, you click on the add widget in the bottom, and to remove, you click on the “-” sign next to the item.

Still about the add and remove topic, it was noticed that the “-” sign is used as an indicator of how many of that widget is being used, and also as a control to remove the widget (which, by the way, removes all widgets at once but doesn’t made it previously clear to the user [MoRpHeUz]).

9 – And what about functionalities issues?

The installing and uninstalling new plasmoids turn out to be a major concern – participants claimed it is painful to do.
Suggestions were about more integration with gnhs and a common interface, not evolving more then 2 steps to install and use -

i.e. launching their applet browser from the applet browser and then the applet you picked doesn’t go directly on desktop but appears on the main appletbrowser list… [notmart]

Still within this topic, ideas of rating and commenting widgets were brought. Comments/rating appearing in something like the tooltip, as the preview tooltip idea. This ideas probably came to cover the necessity of more information about the applets. Another idea, to sum up, was: a single click on the widget would expand the item and show the new informations about it: preview/screenshot, comments/rating.

14 – Take a look at these mockups and talk about it:
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Plasma+-+Add+Widgets+Mockup?content=101423
http://blusrcu.ba/nookie/?p=22

This topic can be described in topics:
- Long&linear list, mac os like, doesn’t solve the problems
- Something that can show more plasmoids is needed, cause there are lots of it
- Mockups show widgets explorer attached to the panel – seems not nice
- Window become opaque when drag is started

Untill now, the item “window become opaque” was the only one with approval of the most of the participants. The other issues weren’t solved, but brought us something to think about, indeed.

Some ideas about the way widgets are displayed came up, but that wasn’t a solved discussion too. The ideas are these to be considered:
- Multi-row thing. Concern: even less info appearing [notmart]. Possible solution: auto grow on hover [pinheiro]
- Tooltips
- Meta info pane (dolphin like) with screenshot, etc. [pinda]
- Categories in a side panel always on, instead of combo, or something like a tag cloud [pinda, notmart]
- Horizontal scroll list, taking advantage of the screen width [aseigo]

————-

At the end of the session, [aseigo] entered the channel and did a strong sum up of his point of view:

well, it’s probably all been discussed, but what i really would like to see is: * quick navigation, *categories, * search, * beauty, *simplicity”, “> install/remove is the other major feature set needed.

He also brought the question about the need of having the remove option:

removing applets that are running == not very useful anymore.

If there were more people at the time, this would surely bring lots of discussion.

————-

So this is it! As you can see, the focus group session gave us lots and lots of material do work on. It was 2 hours of good talking

Thanks again to everyone who participated and helped this matter.

annie.C

Like I promissed you, the step-by-step of the GSoC project will be all described in this blog.

So, for now…

As I said in my proposal, the first task of this project, besides studying libs and stuff, would be the appliance of the focus group technique, right?! Ok.

But, first, what is this focus group about? Well, it’s something like a meeting with 8 – 12 people with opinions (very important – they gotta have opinions) about certain matter. There is also moderator that is going to lead this 1-2 hour discussion, and he will make sure that all the points and questions to the matter were covered. Here is wikipedia to help you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_group

In this project, the moderator would be me and the matter would be the Widgets Explorer, of course.

But how to get it done? Well, the traditional technique says it must be a traditional meeting, with people in the same room. But since this matter involves a international community – and so it would be hard to get together at the same room –  how about turning this room into an irc channel at freenode? That would be much better, huh?

Ok, so here is the real deal: 

Me and Rob Scheepmaker (a.k.a. pinda), another student at GSoC with the Network Transparecy in Plasma project , are going to organize a focus group at #plasma-focusgroup, on friday, at 1 PM, UTC timing.  Me and pinda are  together on this since we are both dealing with applets.

*Just to get your attention

There are going to be 12 people (hopefully) discussing the applets subject and me and pinda are going to be the moderators of this focus group session. 

Don’t worry, we’ll be following a script so that the discussion won’t get lost. We are also going to try to make things not messy, with the help of the participants

Please, if you are willing to help and want your opinion on the discussion about the applets and widgets explorer, send me an e-mail (anaceciliamb@gmail.com) with your name, relationship with the community (designer | developer | user), and registered nickname at freenode – then I can put you on the invitation-list of the #plasma-focusgroup channel. 

We’ll try to gather 3-4 designers, 3-4 developers and 3-4 purely users.

The list has already begun:

1. ivan_cukic (my mentor!)
2. aseigo
3. nookie

Please, if you want to help, email me!

Thanks you all!

Hey everyone,

This is my turn to start posting in english. So here I go!

This post is for the great news – the next post I’ll apologize for the careless with my blog and explain the reasons.

And for the great news: I got a proposal accepted for the Google Summer of Code 09! Great, huh? Man, that feels great indeed! From now on you’ll be keeping up with the step-by-step of the project from here, starting from now!

My proposal was for a new Widget Explorer (add applets dialog) to the Plasma project with the KDE institution. For a better understanding, here is my proposal :

Motivation for Proposal / Goal:

Plasma’s soul resides on Plasmoids and so it ought to be treated with love. An important concern about the delivery of these applications to the users should be “how do we do it – how do we deliver such applications to our regular users, so that they can make the best use of it?”, “how to they like it?”. These questions have been made and the answers are not all satisfactory: plasma’s widget explorer, used by most of users to search for their best suited applications, is useful, but not suitable.There’s a whole world of widgets going on in there, and also another whole world on the internet – this much of information and treasure should be pretty well organized and delivered carefully planned, aiming the best experience and use of it.

That’s what’s the Widget Explorer does: let’s us choose among a world of widgets the ones that suits us best and make it possible to easily add to our workspace.

Today’s widget explorer, though, gives too little information about what the applications are about and how it should behave in your machine.  Also, there is no concern about the worst case scenario, where a user has dozens of Plasmoids and no way of simply organizing them. Today’s designers have too much work to do, since they’re the ones who do all the plasmoids icons to the explorer. What if we could provide something to represent a Plasmoid while it has no icon yet? Or maybe no icons at all? Some say anything is better than what we have today – so I’m willing to make this something come out nice!

The main motivation of developing such project is the fact that it’s clear to me the importance of this interface to the plasmoids world – it connects the user to a whole world of new possibilities and opportunities. Being aware of this matter to the KDE/Plasma community, I decided to propose a new interface to be used by hundreds of users every day, and deliver it beautifully – modern, plasma-like, with better organized information, intuitive and beautiful.

Implementation Details:

The conception of the project begins with a user centered study where I’ll try to find the exact problem with the new interface and then try to come up with the best suited idea for the New Widget Explorer.

The user study, the idea conception and the mockups will begin with the focus groups, which is a technique where I’ll group a bunch of people (users/not users, developers/not developers) and analyze their experience with the widget explorer. With that, I will learn what are the most common errors and dislikes. After this activity, I will do an analysis of similars (to see what’s going on out there) and right after that it’s time to start thinking about the application – that will be done with brainstorms over the product briefing.  As a product of the storms in my brain, I will deliver mockups to the community, looking for its approval.

I won’t forget, though, that there are a few mockups made by the KDE community that are available as suggestions to the ‘Add Widget’ dialog – I collected some links that ought to be considered on the interface prototyping phase, since there was already a study made over this matter that must not be discarded:  

 

Add Widgets Dialog Mockup

(I just want to emphasize that the whole user study, idea conception and mockups are going to be made at the weeks before the official start-coding week. It’s an extra-necessary-work that I want do to in parallel with the libs and codes studies.)

And now it’s time to code!

Since the community is not happy about the today’s explorer and there would be too much to be done to make it nicer, I decided to re-build it from the beginning and make it even better. The backend is going to be remade, with few reuses, and its structure will be made according to the new functionalities.

Today’s ‘Add Widgets’ dialog will be discarded in favor of a brand new one using the power of libplasma. The new dialog will be carefully designed, keeping in mind the usability and the Plasma way of doing things’.

Apart from the new and more specific functionalities that may come after the user study, there are functional requirements that can be already listed and which will be implemented:

- Ability to easily select and add a new widget;
- Ability to know what the widget is about;
- Ability to do a fast and easy widget browsing, even on a large collection;
- Browse over widgets shown in categories;
- Ability to install / remove widgets:
   .Downloaded plasmoids;
   .From local file;
- Downloaded Google gadgets;
- Ability to know whether a widget is active or not.

As you can see, my work starts this week already, together with my lib studies.

This week I’ll be doing the focus group technique, which will be applied offline, with local people – it will not be an interview or questionary, keep that in mind. The focus group will serve as a guideline to the process of the interface conception – as well as the mockups I gathered at the community.

My timeline looks like this:

Week -5 to 0 (April 20 to May 23)

- Study of libplasma and familiarization with the widget explorer code

- Focus Group

- Analysis of similars

- Product briefing and the list of requisites tightly raised.

- Brainstorms, brainstorms, brainstorms

- Delivery of the mockups to the community for approval (especially designers’ approval)

Week 0 (May 23)

- Start coding and constructing the skeleton of the backend of the project:

Week 1 to Week 4

- Build the whole backend necessary to:

- Deliver the Plasmoids to the users and make it work on the desktop/panel;

- Deliver the functional requirements of the Widget Explorer;

- Deploy the specific requirements that will be collected after the focus group activity. That means: if tagging/grouping the users’ plasmoids is necessary, I’ll develop the backend with an optimized way of recording such informations and listing the plasmoids according to these informations;

- Discard the need of Plasmoids icons. That means: if instead of icons there will be a screenshot of the applet, or even an actual preview of the thing, the backend needs to support it.

Week 5 (July 6)

- Create a simple supporting GUI to see the backend in action and run all the necessary tests. Make it all bug-free.

Week 6 to Week9

- Start drawing the necessary svg’s to implement the GUI

- Start coding the final GUI with libplasma and, if necessary, implement extra animations.

Week10 to Week11

- Integration between the backend and frontend.

- Run the final tests and fix the final bugs

Week 13 (September 3)

Submission of required code samples to Google

This is a big thing for me, and hopefully you’ll see a great project being made!

Now let me go celebrate!

cheers!

Bem, esse é o meu primeiro post! Depois de longa espera, eu vim!

Bem, vou começar sem contextualizações, pra não perder tempo…

… O arduino era uma boa saída para um projeto que vinha desenvolvendo no laboratório de minha atual pesquisa (a gente fala sobre isso depois). Estava bem animada em aprender a usar o arduino – teríamos que bolar uma interação entre ele, um rfid reader e um celular. Enfim, estava tudo certo para implementarmos, até que dei de cara com um fato: eu estou trabalhando em um laboratório de design e, lá, o mais importante é a conceituação do produto – a implementação só chega se der tempo. E não há tempo!… Mas que tapa na cara! Nada de implementação….
Eu estava louca pra meter minha mão nesses trambolhos tecnológicos e não vou poder (não em tempo de trabalho nem com bolso alheio). Para o projeto, faremos protótipos de madeira, cenários com bonecos e mockup da aplicação em actionscript… Nada de implementação real. Nada feio, tudo bonito!Varias idéias muito legais pro mockup e apresentação do produto estão surgindo, though. A diversão continua! Pura dirversão
Mas voltando… Como não vai rolar no trabalho, decidi mexer em casa. Como não tenho um arduino ainda, comecei baixando o livro “Getting started with arduino” e dando uma explorada no site. O primeiro comentário é que eu NÃO SEI NADA de eletrônica, mas estou com boas vibrações a respeito da minha interação com a protoboard.

Foi ai que comecei a desvendar um mundo que não conhecia (só tinha ouvido dos meus colegas comparsas). A linguagem utilizada pelo Arduino é baseada em Wiring, uma versão bem simplificada de C. Pesquisando sobre Wiring, descobri que ela foi fruto da linguagem Processing, que, vinda primeiro, criou a IDE Processing (linguagem e IDE chamam-se Processing) e emprestou para Wiring. O IDE também é utilizado para desenvolver na linguagem do arduino.

Então foi assim que me foquei: decidi direcionar meus estudos para Processing, já que é a raiz disso tudo ai.
O ambiente é simples e intuitivo – é só baixar que já sabe usar. A linguagem, baseada em Java, é extremamente intuitiva. Eu comecei codando sem nem olhar na API – não sei se é porque é tão parecida com Java que eu já sabia que funçoes e atributos chamar, mas eu consegui descobrir a maioria.

(Alaninha, minha amiga, se a gente conhecesse Processing há 1 ano, nosso trabalho com moldes [essa é uma historia comprida que vou contar, com a ajuda dela, aqui mesmo] teria  sua complexidade e nível de estresse agregado diminuído em frações!)

Processing, como aponta o link, é uma linguagem voltada para o desenvolvimento gráfico, é extremamente visual, compacta, própria para quem quer desenvolver, contruir interações. O melhor, ela tem o grande desafio de tornar os próprios artistas e designers capazes de programar o visual e o interativo (assim como a linguagem Wiring também tem esse desafio).

Bem, pra encurtar o papo, deixando mais pra próxima (já foi demais pra primeiro post de apresentação, huh?), ai vai o applet (que, por sinal, exportei com 1 click – mas não consegui inserir aqui) da aplicação que fiz em 30 min, depois de conhecer o Processing por apenas também 30 minutos. Só pra não ter o que mostrar.

ps: como nao consegui colocar o applet aqui, ao clicar na imagem você ganha o .jar.

código:

int oldMouseX = 0;
int oldMouseY = 0;

void drawPaintBuckets() {
PImage blue = loadImage(”paintbucket Blue copy.png”);
PImage green = loadImage(”paintbucket Green copy.png”);
PImage red = loadImage(”paintbucket Red copy.png”);

image(blue, 0, 0, 60, 110);
image(green, 0, 112, 60, 110);
image(red, 0, 224, 60, 110);
}

void setup() {
size(400, 400);
drawPaintBuckets();
}

void draw() {
if(!mousePressed) {
oldMouseX = mouseX;
oldMouseY = mouseY;
}
}

void mouseDragged() {
if(!(mouseX < 60 && mouseY < 334)) {
line(oldMouseX, oldMouseY, mouseX, mouseY);
oldMouseX = mouseX;
oldMouseY = mouseY;
}
}

void mousePressed(){
if(mouseY <= 110 && mouseX <= 60) stroke(0, 0, 255);
else if(mouseY <= 222 && mouseX <= 60) stroke(0, 255, 0);
else if(mouseY <= 334 && mouseX <= 60) stroke(255, 0, 0);
}

void mouseMoved(){
if(mouseX < 60 && mouseY < 334) {
cursor(HAND);
} else {
cursor(CROSS);
}
}