Plasma Active update from Marco Martin
On 9 October 2011 the
Plasma Active project had its first release, dubbed
Plasma Active One, targeting towards tablet devices: a complete KDE
software stack with a touch friendly UI on top of
MeeGo 1.2 and
Balsam/Opensuse.
Since the release many improvements have been made.
In cooperation with the
Mer project the entire stack has been ported to this mobile-optimized base distribution for use by device manufacturers as well, in both
i586 and
ARM variants.
Speaking of
ARM, Plasma Active on Mer was successfully installed and ran on variegated devices such as the
BeagleBoard, The
Advent Vega tablet and the Nokia N950.
On the code side, Plasma active recently gained a new set of bindings that provide data models to easily use
Nepomuk, with a simple way to define
complex queries to the semantic database right from
QML to visualize the results from standard item views such as the ListView, GridView and PathView standard elements. In this example we show all the images with a rating of at least 3:
import QtQuick 1.1
import org.kde.metadatamodels 0.1
ListView {
model: MetadataModel {
resourceType: "nfo:Image"
minimumRating: 3
}
delegate: Text {text: label}
}
An important part of the new series is the QML UI components, which will benefit not only Plasma Active but KDE Plasma Desktop 4.8 as well.
There is now a set of QML based graphical widgets, themed with the Plasma SVG engine. It shares the same API on the desktop and on Plasma Active even though the look and behavior is different on the two systems, adapting to the different input methods (mouse vs touchscreen), screen resolution and pixel density.
If you want to know more or get involved in the Plasma Active project you can write to the active@kde.org mailing list or join us in #active IRC channel on freenode.
