Yesterday I added virtual keyboard support to konsole: select the text area and the software keyboard, if any, appears. This frees me from having to lug around a keyboard with my tablet just to do command line stuff. It was a small patch, nothing fancy, really. Took me maybe 10 minutes.
Today I `zypper dup`d my tablet to get the latest packages and to my wonderment there was a new konsole package. After it installed, I started up konsole and sure enough: on screen keyboard delight!
Less than 24 hours from development to deployment: I wrote and tested it on my laptop yesterday, this morning it is on my tablet which only has packages (to keep it semi-sane for demos and user testing). What more could a developer dream for?
Suse's OBS, which we are using for these things, absolutely rocks. And with this tool enabling their passion, Sebastian and the other Plasma Active packagers are quite simply rocking the house and helping keep the development-deployment-testing-feedback circle small and tight.
Beautiful.
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We also need an OSK for the login screen and kscreenlocker.
I haven't tested this, but don't we need an on-screen-keyboard daemon thingy to automatically pop up when a text field is selected?
@aditya That is the Plasma OSK :-)
Ow, forgot. We need to make it work in kdm as well.
@aditya: "We also need an OSK for the login screen and kscreenlocker."
for the login screen, yes. well .. maybe. these devices really ought to default to autologin by default, and a non-password scheme for multi-user, should we decide to officially support such a thing (which could give us a feature advantage over other systems out there?), might be interesting. barring that, however: yes, we need the OSK on KDM.
for the screenlocker, however, for these sorts of devices i feel that a password is not the way to go. other devices out there aren't doing this either. we could offer it as an option, perhaps, in which case we do need the OSK to pop (which is solvable by putting a proper OSK window hint into kwin), but i really want to see a touch only unlocker by default.
Nicely done, Aaron. Could you link to the commit for us lazy folk, perhaps?
P.S. I don't think "zypper dup" needs to be "past tense'd" (:P). Just read it as "zyppered up"
Is there any lists of recommended hardware? I know it is obvious to some that tablets running Snapdragon and Tegra chips probably aren't going to be running Plasma Active any time soon, so it'd be nice to get a list of tablets and netbooks that are good choices to buy. Tablets and netbooks are typically built with very specific hardware that isn't user-upgradeable so a list like that shouldn't be too difficult to make.
Even if it's just a list of what tablets KDE developers working on Plasma Active are using, it's better than nothing..
Ahh... Nevermind.. Found the hardware support list here:
http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Devices
Hmmm.. HP is selling off their discontinued HP Touchpads for dirt cheap.. $99 (from $499) for 16GBs and $149 for 32GBs (from $599).
They're going to sell all 250,000 of them, and I really hope that the Linux community can get some decent software on these things now that HP has said they won't continue to support WebOS.
It's 250,000 tablet
users who are all likely going to be turning to Linux for long-term software support.
Hopefully we can get these things rooted and running Plasma Active....
I got one myself, it's older hardware than most tablets on the market, but it's very cheap.
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