Between now and March we have a busy schedule for the Spark efforts.
First, I'll be at CEBIT from the 7th-9th (and part of the 6th) where Spark will be demoing at the Xompu booth (Hall 9, A50) as well as the KDE booth (Hall 2, E62). I'll also be volunteering some time at the KDE booth as a community member, so I won't be there only for Spark. Still, I'll be around and available for meetings and hallway discussions about Spark and Make·Play·Live.
I'm also working on logistics for the Americas, which is starting to come together. I will also be in Philadelphia next week for a few days of Spark-related business.
The technology side is similarly busy: we're working towards having the Spark tablet OS images ready to go. This isn't quite as
exciting as it sounds as nearly all the code is already publicly
available, but it's an important pre-launch step to have the image published.
The current work is
divided between kernel scrubbing and interface tweaking. On the UI side
we have been working on things like making all the thumbnails and other
visuals in Plasma Active adaptively scalable, which QML has actually
made remarkably easy. Marco has tied it into the standard KDE settings
for icon sizes and changing those settings causes Plasma Active to
relayout ... on the fly! We have also been identifying elements slated for
Plasma Active 3 that we want to include, such as the Nepomuk-backed
"file manager" written in QML, and getting the Add Ons app ready.
We'll also be unveiling the branding for Make·Play·Live and Spark next month. We're working with a great team of two very dedicated and enthusiastic designers here in
Zürich who really "get" the philosophy and concepts. I can't wait to
share the results with everyone!
While that continues, we'll also be progressively populating the Make·Play·Live website with content
covering our goals and philosophy, Spark in detail (including a comprehensive FAQ),
information on partner and volume sales plans, documentation of our community interfaces and support and our roadmap.
Combined with the organizational
efforts required to make it all come together, we have a lot of work ahead of us. Thanks to everyone who has supported us and helped us get this far. What a beginning its been! What a road it shall be! :)
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7 comments:
What a wonderful way to start the KDE Workspace 5 work ;).
I see all of these elements coming back to desktop and joining with KDELibs 5 to become a real and full fledged KDE 5. Thanks for that.
Thanks also for doing the extra effort to have South American delivery.
So here is what Canonical did: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gUXUjjg9qQ0
I think that you could take a look there to see how they run Android applications?(may be it's not just because they run the OS on Android :) ).
Great news, thanks for all your hard work! I can't wait to get my hands on one and get app or two of mine in the store. I love the idea of a real open alternative to android. We wouldn't happen to be able to run QtCreator from on the device, would we, because that would be wonderful. I would assume it would just be a matter of packaging. Anyway thanks again, here's hoping the rest of the linux community gets as excited a project as I am.
Thanks for all you are doing, Aaron and Co.!!!!
I just wanted to ask a question around Plasma 3 and subsequent upgrades, because it is quite common to see software upgrades make devices obsolete, mostly because requirements change, etc. This is most often a commercial move aiming at selling more devices, but still, there may be sensible reasons to do it.
Long story short: Will Spark be upgradable to Plasma 3? How will the upgrade go? Will there be available upgrades after that (Plasma 4, 5, etc.) Is there a point where you consider the device and its hardware will be too old to still be getting upgrades?
Thanks for your time and answers!
@Alejandro Nova: it's great to see people making the connection with the 5.x work. Plasma Active has indeed been a testbed for many of the technology directions we wanted to head towards. so yes .. it's helping influence and contribute to the future of Frameworks 5 as well as Workspaces 5 :)
@Alliance: that video is flagged as private; however, i've seen what Canonical is doing and think it's pretty neat and wish them the best with it. as for Android apps on Spark, it is absolutely possible to get a Dalvik runtime up on Mer. that said, my experience with Android on tablets is that most of the apps seriously suck on tablets. they are nearly all designed for phones, a lot of them suck battery like no tomorrow and seem to have missed the memo that said "the future is screen size variance". so .. in the balance between "number of apps" and "number of good apps", i'm not sure how much we lose not having Android apps on the tablet.
still, it would be a worthwhile exercise.
@9ats6y: QtCreator on the device would be pretty funky :) i'm not sure how well the UI would work in a touch env, though you could certainly slap a USB keyboard and mouse on there in a pinch. to try this out, someone would need to start a package/build of QtCreator in the community OBS and then install it from there.
@Chema Martín: we won't be pushing such huge upgrade automatically as we don't want to break devices on people (larger updates are more risky, for obvious reasons :) or disrupt their experience too radically on them.
however, we will be making images available and people who are willing to flash the device themselves should be able to do so.
and you don't even need to wait on us: it's completely possible for the community to build such images (and we would be happy to help host them to make them easy to share..).
this is a very different sort of relationship between device owner and manufacturer. you are not held back by our decisions. :)
on a personal note, i HATE it when people chuck out perfectly good hardware just because of forced upgrade or software obsolescence. it is so wasteful and unnecessary. :(
thank you ALL for your support. :)
If I wanted to try spark on my Zenithink C71 what would I need to download sir Aaron
also how in the world did you guys get the source code, I don't think it was released was it, where is it.
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