tastes like candy

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!