Akademy: Contour and Plasma Active

Contour was a project to create a mobile, touch-friendly user experience atop Qt and KDE that started in 2010. It eventually became part of the KDE's Plasma Active effort so Eva Brucherseifer came to Akademy to recount how and why that came about. She also discussed how the Contour design process worked, along with the process of integrating Plasma Active with various device platforms.

Brucherseifer is a longtime KDE community member, going back to the 1990s. She was elected to the KDE e.V. board in 2002 and served as its president for three years, which is what happens "if you talk too much about what should be done". She started the embedded services company basysKom in 2003 and serves as its managing director.

Contour's history and goals

In the (northern hemisphere) summer of 2010, there were lots of ideas floating around that factored into the ideas behind Contour, she said. Using context and semantic data to provide recommendations for users was one idea. There was also a lot of talk about the mobile space, and back then people were anticipating numerous Linux devices to ship with Qt because of MeeGo. The idea of "daily use" devices and the need for an improved user interface to support that use case was another consideration.

People at basysKom were thinking about these ideas, which led to Contour. Later in 2010 the project was formed based on Qt and KDE. Contour project members wrote a proposal and the project was granted funding by the German Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie (Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology). So, basysKom and the German government each funded half of the project.

The core idea behind Contour is to be "information-centric" rather than "app-centric" as the iPhone is. The goal was to create a new user paradigm where context and usage information are used to adapt the device's behavior to the user and their needs. A "learning system" would be used to try to derive patterns of use so that the device could anticipate and facilitate the user's task. There were ideas on how to do that, she said, but it was unclear if they would work.

For Contour, using KDE's "activities" made sense as a way to group the information around specific tasks that users do. By using contexts, such as what time of day it is and whether the user is at home or work, the interface can have an idea of the "things you do at those times". Deriving the usage patterns will help make it easier for the user, she said.

Contour is a user experience (UX) layer on top of the Plasma shell. Other UXes are possible, including ones targeted at set-top boxes or automobiles.

Designing the interface

The Contour interface evolved as the project tried out various ideas. Brucherseifer put up images of different parts of the interface (e.g. activity switcher, activity screen) as they changed from the initial prototype to the final design (which can be seen in her slides [PDF]). The activity switcher started out as a stacked set of activities, with a slider to activate the switch. That moved through a rotating "wheel" of activities that kept the slider to the final version which kept the wheel idea, but made the activity thumbnails completely visible and eliminated the slider. The three versions from her slides are shown at right.

Similarly, the activity screen that shows the files, applications, and other information associated with an activity went through a number of iterations. It moved from a tree-like structure to something more like a standard desktop. When she shows the interface to customers as an example of what can be done with Qt and QML, "they love it".

There are still more things to do, including an application launcher and a task switcher. WebKit integration is still lacking, but is needed because HTML 5 will be important, she said. Private, password-protected activities are another feature that will be added. Some of these features will be needed for a real product, but the project couldn't get to all of them.

In addition to a tablet UX, basysKom created an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) UX as an internal project. It took two person-months to implement, she said, and it still needs some polish. It was done as an experiment to see how long it would take.

Designing the UXes went through several phases. It started with sketches, which were then turned into wireframes using Photoshop. Promising versions were then implemented using QML. Multiple iterations back and forth between those steps were required, she said.

Getting the code onto devices was challenging. The project started basing itself on top of MeeGo, because it believed that the two big companies behind the distribution would make for a stable platform. That didn't work out, of course, so a switch to Mer was eventually made.

The project "learned a lot" in getting its code running on two different devices: the WeTab/ExoPC and the Archos G9. There was a need to create binary RPMs for all of the packages as well as a single binary image that could be installed onto the devices. Some of those things are not necessarily easy to accomplish using volunteers in an open community.

Plasma Active

In March 2011, Plasma Active was announced. A workshop was held in Darmstadt, Germany where basysKom joined forces with Sebastian Kügler of open-slx and Aaron Seigo of Coherent Theory to create Plasma Active. Contour was adopted as the "activities and recommendations" piece of Plasma Active. Several coding sprints were held and two releases of Plasma Active have been made so far.

There were multiple reasons behind basysKom's decision to contribute Contour to KDE. The company could have held on to Contour and sold it to customers, but if it wanted to develop the technology upstream the code needed to be free. Trying to set up a "joint process" between the community and companies was another consideration. Plasma Active is a chance for KDE to succeed in the mobile space, which also factored into the decision. She (and, by extension, basysKom) cares about KDE, so it made sense to contribute Contour to the effort.

There were a few challenges that Plasma Active has faced over the last year or so. The cooperation between the community and companies can be hard at times. Volunteers often work all day then work on Plasma Active at night, which can make it hard to hit deadlines. The embedded development process is "not there yet", she said, and encouraged anyone interested to help out with that. In addition, desktop technologies are "too large and slow" for embedded devices; Plasma Active is still too large for many devices.

On the other hand, a lot of things have gone well. There were lots of KDE frameworks that could be reused, which made it relatively easy and quick to get something working. It surprised her how quickly things could come together. The project also produced highly motivated people; there were basysKom employees who wanted to continue working on Plasma Active even after the company needed to scale back its commitment, for example.

Plasma Active is not done yet; what has been produced so far is a "starting point", Brucherseifer said. There is currently no way to manage multiple open applications, for example, which is "probably very solvable", but needs to be done. More automation is needed in creating images for devices and there is a need for release management and QA as well. Those who are interested should get an Archos G9 and an image from basysKom to get started. Support for the WeTab/ExoPC is still available, but those devices are no longer on the market, so the project is focused on the G9 for now.

An audience member asked about how to get the design process used by Contour and Plasma Active into KDE. Brucherseifer said that the most important part is that developers need to be open to suggestions. basysKom hired two UX people to work on the project, but they "didn't really enjoy it". The developers had very different opinions from the designers, which made things difficult at times. There is a need for a different culture between developers and designers, "if both could give a little bit, it would be helpful", she said.

At the end of the talk, Brucherseifer demonstrated the interface, including showing how the recommendation system worked. The UX looks quite usable at this point, though there are still things to do as she noted. It will be interesting to see real devices shipped with Plasma Active (such as the Vivaldi tablet) down the road.

[ The author would like to thank KDE e.V. for travel assistance to Tallinn for Akademy. ]