Plasma sneaks in your pocket

Speakers: Artur Duque de Souza and Alexis Menard

When the KDE project started working on version 4, the Plasma project was created to replace the old legacy KDE 3 workspace. The first requirement at that time was to create a powerful desktop shell for KDE4. But since then Plasma have evolved a lot and thanks to its architecture it now does much more than its original vision. For example, Plasma in KDE 4.4 brought a dedicated shell and interface for netbooks. Besides that, we can notice that consumers market for mobile phone is evolving quite a lot (iPhone, Palm Pre, Nokia N900) and new phones are bringing new hardware and new graphical capabilities. When the Nokia N900 was released (using the Maemo Linux distribution) it became natural for KDE to look at these new opportunities : getting Plasma to run on these devices. During this talk, we will introduce the Plasma mobile shell, an interface dedicated to mobile phones. The talk will cover initial challenges when porting Plasma to the Maemo Platform, for example the small screen. We will dive through usability issues, performances problems and new modules we had to create. The current status of the project and how we solved some of the problems will be presented. Then the talk will finish with a vision of the project and what we want to achieve.

Artur Duque de Souza

Linux user since 1997, MoRpHeUz (a.k.a. Artur de Souza) worked for IBM (Linux Technology Center) and actually works for INdT (Nokia’s Institute of Technology) as a researcher at the openBossa stream, developing open-source solutions for mobile devices. He is also a KDE developer and tries to spread the KDE spirit anywhere he goes.

Alexis Menard

Alexis Menard is a Software Engineer at Nokia, Qt Development Frameworks in Oslo. He holds a M.Sc. in computer science from Toulouse 3 University (France). Before joining the team of Qt developers, he was involved in the KDE project - mainly in Plasma where he brought new features and helped in various areas. In 2008, he became part of Qt Widget Team where he now spend most of his time on Qt Graphics View framework bringing new features and speed. Nowadays he is mainly working on Plasma-Mobile and KDE Mobile.