Building Converging UIs

I just blogged about my article on linux.com about the just-released KDE Frameworks 5 sneak preview.

Convergence in 2010: Plasma Netbook

Converging Form Factors

On the Frameworks, one can soon expect to see releases of KDE's Plasma Workspaces. A Technology Preview of Plasma 2 has already been released and this ambitious project has not lost any of its goals. Today, I noted that ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote about what he expects from Ubuntu in 2014. There, he quotes Jono Bacon talking about formfactor convergence. And the intarwebs are full of people making jokes that Microsoft is copying Ubuntu with their single UI for multiple devices. But let's not forget where they got their ideas...

What is real ambition?

I would argue that neither Apple, Microsoft, GNOME, nor Ubuntu/Canonical are even half as ambitious as the KDE Community in the area of convergence. They are all merely catching up to the state of KDE technology in 2010. In that year, the KDE community released Plasma Netbook, a plasma-based shell optimized for another form factor: the netbook. With far more advanced convergence than anybody today has yet shown: Plasma Netbook and Plasma Desktop share well over 90% of their code, as opposed to not even sharing toolkit or display shell (Ubuntu) and having a completely separate desktop (Apple). On Plasma, widgets can dynamically adjust to the constraints of their environment, be it on a panel, free-form on the desktop, full-screen, in a window or in a tiled environment. And yes, the different form-factor optimized shells be switched on-the-fly. No separate login or account, no loss of functionality, no separate applications for each shell, nothing like that. It just works. See this blog from 2011 to get an idea how the tablet plans were doing.

Plasma on desktop/netbook/phone in 2011.

I understand what Microsoft is doing - trying to build a single user interface for vastly different devices. And I guess we've all seen how it does not work - Apple is smarter, in that regard. Underlying technology can of course be re-used but you simply can not make a UI which works equally well on a 75 DPI 24" screen with mouse & keyboard, on a 455 dpi touch phone, on a 300 DPI touch tablet and a 64" television with Kinect or something like that...

Instead, the Plasma team has build a technology which separates presentation from logic, allowing you to build UI's which adapt dynamically to the needs of the form factor.

Below is a video of Plasma's awareness of the container size in action, like it has functioned since it was released in 2008.


Now I don't deny that in terms of resources, MS and Apple are so far ahead they can make pigs fly. Our more advanced architecture and ideas can't really compete with what they do and as long as we have 0.5% market share on the desktop, Free Software will probably not get the resources it needs to polish things to the same degree. That's a bit frustrating but it doesn't mean we frequently do things far beyond what the big boys do: anybody who has seen the introduction of the upcoming release of Mac OS X and knew about KDE Connect knows we're way ahead of them when it comes to phone-desktop integration ;-)

Moving Forward

All this technology will be brought to a new level with the release of Plasma 5, where your workspace will be able to smoothly morph into a different form factor without even a hickup. So, when it comes to the convergence of formfactors, KDE is lightyears ahead of what the competition is even aiming for. And outside of that, we're doing awesome stuff, for sure.

Did I say something about the power of innovating in the open? That's what I'm talking about.