My first impressions on plasma-active is that it is great. I have been using plasma desktop on my main pc at work (research lab) for some time and the activities became an important part of my flow work. I wanted to enlarge this experience to my ideapad s10-3t, which was running gnome 3, and I jumped on the plasma-active.

I installed it using opensuse 12.1 as indicated in the wiki. As I am first time user of SUSE, usually use arch, I got some minor difficulties but soon solved them.

I do not get much recommendations and because this machine do not have any GPS any the number of applications supporting it is small, recommendation may be limited... will wait more to see how it goes.

For real life application, at work and at home, I have some problems:

1. I read that the application showed in the launch area are limited to touch friendly application and that other are blacklisted and hidden. However I often use some very non touch friendly apps, like qtiplot, and I want fast access to them. How do I unblacklist them? Is there a file to edit?

2. I use to add widgets that are not include in the default selection of active: for examplefacebook widget. Will it be possible to add a "Get more widgets" links as in the desktop version?

3. I could not find a way to simulate right cliks on the touchscreen. In gnome I use to select right click by long touch in accessibility preferences, is it possible?

4. Allow switching application with Alt-tab and Activities with Super-tab. May be possible to reassign it in the system settings, but why turn it off by default, even if active is aimed at tablet, it should not cost too much to keep the default shortcut...

5. The weirdest thing: I, not on purpose, grabbed and drop text on the window switcher part of the panel. It created some note widget on the panel with the text inside. The problem is there is no way to remove it, or I didn't find...

6. The system tray, on the left side of the panel, not sure if it is a typical systray, do not show all icons, i.e. dropbox icon is not shown. Also the icon are sometimes moving, their oder change, making it very difficult to click/touch them...

7. Make it possible to associate a folder with an activity from within dolphin. This is I think possible using tags, I have to work on it.

8. not very important but may be nice for me. I am using firefox as my main browser on different platform. It would be nice if firefox bookmarks could be accessible from active. But this may be more for a firefox extension...

Overall, good work to all the devs, I hope plasma active will have a lot of success. And sorry I am not a developper, just an end user, so I am not of great help. I should really try to learn coding...

S.

seal20 wrote:My first impressions on plasma-active is that it is great. I have been using plasma desktop on my main pc at work (research lab) for some time and the activities became an important part of my flow work. I wanted to enlarge this experience to my ideapad s10-3t, which was running gnome 3, and I jumped on the plasma-active.

I am glad that you like Plasma UX.

seal20 wrote:I installed it using opensuse 12.1 as indicated in the wiki. As I am first time user of SUSE, usually use arch, I got some minor difficulties but soon solved them.

I do not get much recommendations and because this machine do not have any GPS any the number of applications supporting it is small, recommendation may be limited... will wait more to see how it goes.

Do you mean the recommendations panel at the left side of the screen? It does not use GPS yet since none of devices we use for test comes with GPS.

seal20 wrote:For real life application, at work and at home, I have some problems:

1. I read that the application showed in the launch area are limited to touch friendly application and that other are blacklisted and hidden. However I often use some very non touch friendly apps, like qtiplot, and I want fast access to them. How do I unblacklist them? Is there a file to edit?

You can edit the file /usr/share/kde4/config/active-blacklistrc to unblacklist the apps you want.

seal20 wrote:2. I use to add widgets that are not include in the default selection of active: for examplefacebook widget. Will it be possible to add a "Get more widgets" links as in the desktop version?

I am not sure. I think GetHotNewStuff, which is the technology used in Plasma Desktop, is not yet used in Plasma Active. There are ongoing discussing for replacing it with a new technology.

seal20 wrote:3. I could not find a way to simulate right cliks on the touchscreen. In gnome I use to select right click by long touch in accessibility preferences, is it possible?

Plasma Active is designed for touchscreen only, we disencouraged the use of right click in any Plasma Active app:

http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/ ... iderations

seal20 wrote:4. Allow switching application with Alt-tab and Activities with Super-tab. May be possible to reassign it in the system settings, but why turn it off by default, even if active is aimed at tablet, it should not cost too much to keep the default shortcut...

Plasma Active is for touchscreen only devices. You can use Plasma Netbook if you need better support for keyboard shortcuts.

seal20 wrote:5. The weirdest thing: I, not on purpose, grabbed and drop text on the window switcher part of the panel. It created some note widget on the panel with the text inside. The problem is there is no way to remove it, or I didn't find...

Restarting the device did not help?

seal20 wrote:6. The system tray, on the left side of the panel, not sure if it is a typical systray, do not show all icons, i.e. dropbox icon is not shown. Also the icon are sometimes moving, their oder change, making it very difficult to click/touch them...

Any app that implements StatusNotifier specification should work with the system tray.

seal20 wrote:7. Make it possible to associate a folder with an activity from within dolphin. This is I think possible using tags, I have to work on it.

You should contact Dolphin developers about that.

seal20 wrote:8. not very important but may be nice for me. I am using firefox as my main browser on different platform. It would be nice if firefox bookmarks could be accessible from active. But this may be more for a firefox extension...

Yes, that is firefox issue.

seal20 wrote:Overall, good work to all the devs, I hope plasma active will have a lot of success. And sorry I am not a developper, just an end user, so I am not of great help. I should really try to learn coding...
S.

Thanks for the support.

Thanks for the answer and sorry for the delay. After getting a bunch of problems I moved to test the kubuntu active recently released, it is not so bad, the mer image did not boot, but lacks some integrations that was in your built.

lamarque wrote:

seal20 wrote:I installed it using opensuse 12.1 as indicated in the wiki. As I am first time user of SUSE, usually use arch, I got some minor difficulties but soon solved them.

I do not get much recommendations and because this machine do not have any GPS any the number of applications supporting it is small, recommendation may be limited... will wait more to see how it goes.

Do you mean the recommendations panel at the left side of the screen? It does not use GPS yet since none of devices we use for test comes with GPS.

Yes was talking about the recommendation panel. I thoug I read somewhere that it will use GPS but I may do a mistake. Anyway I start to understand how it works. I did not understand at first that you have to, for example, associate a webpage with an activity then it will appear in the recommendation panel then you can add it to the activity by opening it. I though it will be populated automagically depending on the recent used file. Regarding the different steps to associate a webpage to an activity, wouldn't be more straightforward if as soon as we connect something to an activity it appears on the home screen, without having to pass through the recommendation panel?

lamarque wrote:

seal20 wrote:For real life application, at work and at home, I have some problems:

1. I read that the application showed in the launch area are limited to touch friendly application and that other are blacklisted and hidden. However I often use some very non touch friendly apps, like qtiplot, and I want fast access to them. How do I unblacklist them? Is there a file to edit?

You can edit the file /usr/share/kde4/config/active-blacklistrc to unblacklist the apps you want.

ok

lamarque wrote:

seal20 wrote:2. I use to add widgets that are not include in the default selection of active: for examplefacebook widget. Will it be possible to add a "Get more widgets" links as in the desktop version?

I am not sure. I think GetHotNewStuff, which is the technology used in Plasma Desktop, is not yet used in Plasma Active. There are ongoing discussing for replacing it with a new technology.

Waiting for the new implementation, for the moment will install them by hand.

lamarque wrote:

seal20 wrote:3. I could not find a way to simulate right cliks on the touchscreen. In gnome I use to select right click by long touch in accessibility preferences, is it possible?

Plasma Active is designed for touchscreen only, we disencouraged the use of right click in any Plasma Active app:

http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/ ... iderations

I understand your stance but the problem is with netvertible, like the ideapad and very specific use case. Netvertibles presents the "advantage" to be both a tablet and a netbook. So we can use software like libreoffice when in netbook mode, software which requires a right click but as the clickpad is small I tend to use a lot the touchscreen. A very personal use case is the following: At my lab or in the field, in tablet mode, I plug a sensor and plot the data in real time using kst. To be able to arrange some graph on the fly I need to do a right click. If I don't have some place to put the laptop I have to do some balance exercise to push the clickpad... I know that it is very specific and do not match many use case but, for some specific applications that will never be rewritten for tablet, it may be useful to implement some option to simulate right click...

lamarque wrote:

seal20 wrote:4. Allow switching application with Alt-tab and Activities with Super-tab. May be possible to reassign it in the system settings, but why turn it off by default, even if active is aimed at tablet, it should not cost too much to keep the default shortcut...

Plasma Active is for touchscreen only devices. You can use Plasma Netbook if you need better support for keyboard shortcuts.

Same as above with netvertibles...

lamarque wrote:

seal20 wrote:5. The weirdest thing: I, not on purpose, grabbed and drop text on the window switcher part of the panel. It created some note widget on the panel with the text inside. The problem is there is no way to remove it, or I didn't find...

Restarting the device did not help?

I couldn't find a way to remove it, except reinstalling the system. But on the new system I am not able to reproduce the bug anymore. I will try again.

lamarque wrote:

seal20 wrote:6. The system tray, on the left side of the panel, not sure if it is a typical systray, do not show all icons, i.e. dropbox icon is not shown. Also the icon are sometimes moving, their oder change, making it very difficult to click/touch them...

Any app that implements StatusNotifier specification should work with the system tray.

This happen also on the kubuntu active. 2 icons do not appear in the systray and be the problem dropbox and ibus. Dropbox is closed source so cannot do anything, I should move to owncloud. Ibus is more a problem as I need it to input japanese. In fact japanese input works only the icon is missing.

lamarque wrote:

seal20 wrote:7. Make it possible to associate a folder with an activity from within dolphin. This is I think possible using tags, I have to work on it.

You should contact Dolphin developers about that.

.

Ok. By the way what is the recommended way to add tags on a lot of files in batch?

lamarque wrote:

seal20 wrote:8. not very important but may be nice for me. I am using firefox as my main browser on different platform. It would be nice if firefox bookmarks could be accessible from active. But this may be more for a firefox extension...

Yes, that is firefox issue.

Maybe a good way to learn some coding...

Thanks

Sylvain

Recommendations is going to use GPS, but it has not been implemented yet as I wrote in my first answer. I do not understand your other questions about Recommendations. Associating a webpage to activity is adding it to the activity. You can add items to the homescreen using the "Add Items" button on the homescreen.

Sorry, but legacy applications will always cause problems in touchscreen systems like Plasma Active. This is reason we are developing new KDE applications with touchscreen in mind to replace some applications used in Plasma Desktop.

I have never used ibus, I need to test it to figure out why it does not show up on the panel. I am not aware of any way to tag by batch, may it can be done using nepomuk and soprano's dbus interface, but I have never seen someone doing it.