Projects/Plasma/RecommendedReading

Recommended reading

Plasma explores new ideas in user interface design, to allow users to interact with all aspects of their digital lives in an intuitive and enabling manner.

Such a design goal is quite different from what used to drive open source development for graphical user interfaces. To cope with the new requirements of such a bold endeavour this little list of recommended reading can hopefully act as support to the aspiring plasmodian.

• The Humane Interface

This is an excellent book by Jef Raskin on user interface design. Among other things he describes a zooming user interface, similar to what will appear in Plasma.

• Away with Applications: The Death of the Desktop

This is actually Jef's son. Very interesting video.

• Quicksilver: Universal Access and Action

Quicksilver's author talking about Quicksilver. But if you listen closely, you can also hear him talk about krunners future between the lines.

• UI Breakthrough-Command Line Interfaces

Don Norman talking about the return of the CLI. Again very interesting to understand the potential role of krunner in plasma.

• The desktop I'd like to see

Andy Oram is talking about why applications are slowing the user down and how componentization can come to the rescue.

• Software we’d like to see, part six million: the Swamp

Thomas Thurman is reporting about a discussion our friends over at planet gnome had. Some first ideas to abstract our user interfaces away from the file system.

• Interface design and the iPhone

A review by Edward Tufte of certain aspects of the iphone interface. How many occurrences of an ZUI can you spot?

• Bumptop

A couple of very interesting ideas for interacting with your desktop. Some ideas might even be interesting for plasmoids.

• Siftables at MIT

Look ma! Plasmoids you can actually touch!

• Workscape

No comment.

• LifeMap

Looks a little like the digikam containment, if you know what I mean.

• Demo of XO's Sugar interface

See the Sugar interface in action. It's amazing where you can arrive at, when you are willing to challenge old beliefs about how computers work.

• Will videogames become better than life?

Interesting TED talk with a very thought provoking piece by Michael Highland. When you start to understand that every computer user interface creates a virtual reality for its users his thoughts become highly relevant also for the plasma project.

• Tim O'Reilly on Google's voice activated search for the iPhone

Tim O'Reilly talks about how the new field of "mobile" allows us to rethink the interactions betweens humans and computers beyond just keyboards and pointing devices.

• Celeste on usability

KDE's own Celeste Lyn Paul talks about usability and how it is not only about removing options. This is a chat transcript and therefore not so easy to read. But you can always find her on our mailing-list (see below), for in-depth questions. Or contact her on our IRC channel, she set aside special times, where she'll try to help out with all your usability related problems: Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 17:00-19:00 UTC (that's 18:00-20:00 CET and 12:00-14:00 EST)

• The Plasma mailing-list and our IRC channel

Subscribe to our mailing-list or browse the archive or chat with us in #plasma on FreeNode.

We are waiting for you.

--Michaelrudolph 23:53, 20 February 2008 (CET)