Speakers

BOSSA'10 - Speakers, Presentations & Abstracts!!!!

Alexis Menard: "KDE Plasma for mobile phone"

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 will bring 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 his talk, Alexis 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.

Leonardo Sobral Cunha: "QML: the last piece of the kinetic puzzle"

pieces: animation api, statemachine api, effects and declarative UI. From those, the first three parts are already out in the wild, delivered in Qt 4.6 and the last missing piece will come with QML (Qt Markup Language), which is the new declarative language of Qt.

QML will build upon the concepts and infra-structure already available in Qt, such as GraphicsView, animation, states and effects.

Defining your UI using a declarative language is a considerable paradigm shift in comparison to traditional imperative languages (C++, Java, and Python). QML, the declarative language, provides a way of making fluid user interfaces by describing them in terms of simple elements (Text, Image, Rect) that are built up into components. The reason it is "declarative" is that rather than the changes in the UI being expressed as imperative code, they are expressed as sets of property expressions, grouped into states (you define 'what' you want on the screen instead of 'how').

One of the main objectives of this language is to bring developers and designers together, increasing the development productivity and shortening the development iteration cycle. For this purpose there is also a UI design tool being developed as an extension to Qt Creator, called "Bauhaus".

This presentation will walk through the fundamentals of the QML language, showing demos and what you can easily achieve changing to this new declarative mindset.

Along with the rest of KDE, the team working on personal information management is lately reaching beyond the desktop, targeting mobile phones and other smaller form factor devices with its applications. This makes for an interesting problem space as it brings together huge amounts of sensitive data, high throughput, low latency operations, complex and broad feature sets, multi back-end setups, advanced semantically enriched interactions that still need to be fast with resource constraint devices, low bandwidth and high latency connections, difficult usage conditions, small screens, touch screen usage patterns and physical security issues, to name a few aspects. Akonadi, KDE's new personal information management infrastructure has to address these problems, if it is to be a viable option for hand-held devices. This presentation will explore how the Akonadi team is finding solutions for various issues at the architectural, implementation and design level, what challenges remain and what developers and users can expect from this infrastructure in the future

Check the last editions:

• Bossa Conference 2008

• Bossa Conference 2007