Plasma, KDE's new desktop shell that was first released with KDE 4.0 is one of the central elements of the traditional desktop interfaces people have been using on their computers since the mid-eighties. To the user, Plasma is what you start your applications with, and what helps you managing your tasks. Technically speaking, Plasma is a high-level toolkit that allows it to easily build user interfaces. The first product that has been built with Plasma is the KDE 4 desktop. With portability not as an afterthought, one of the design
principles of Plasma was to not make assumptions about user interactions deep down in the software stack, but make it as easy as possible to build plasmoids, small plugins that take care of the user's interaction with the device. For using Plasma on mobile internet devices such as the Maemo platform on an N810, developers are working on integrating QEdje, a technology that is used to build 'fingerable' and visually appealing user interfaces with Plasma
which in turn provides the shell and plumbing to run and combine these interfaces. KDE technology in general provides the underlying infastructure to integrate hardware, multimedia and the ultimately "The Cloud" into the user experience.
|
 Sebastian Kügler has been a KDE hacker since 2004. He's currently working in KDE's Plasma team on powermanagement related issue and exploring using Plasma on small formfactor devices such as the N810 and various netbooks. Sebastian has spearheaded KDE's marketing efforts and joined the KDE e.V.'s Board of Directors in 2006. Sebastian is also involved with KDE's release team where he coordinates the promotion and thinks about higher-level development issues. In his free time, sebas, as he's called on IRC, likes photography and programming, not surprisingly on KDE and Plasma.
|
