Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

just selecting a window _in the current workspace_ would already be an improvement. and implementing that would be _trivial_. see above webos screenshots...

for further heuristics, maybe even remember which browser window has the most tabs coming from mail client links. things like that.



In any case, going back on topic:

Despite our bias, are we certain "make my desktop mobile" the answer?

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

At least, it's an answer that Apple and Google haven't chosen. I don't see any point in trying to make yet another iPhone-knockoff; Android is already a cheap enough and complete enough iPhone-knockoff to make the duopoly smartphone market pretty unbeatable...

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

I am not able to reflect on "What if Jolla never existed" as i have not been here long enough and just came to "make that n900 usable again" and jumped on the Boat just for non google android / Alien Dalvik in the beginning. :rolleyes:

But as you are looking for a business idea anyway, i think i am competent enough to suggest abbreviations of things keeping me afloat as a steadily growing freelancer and share my special view of the market.

1. As said before, "disrupting the market" is not possible without adequat firepower -> money. So simply forget it, the train is gone by 7 years now. Do not be the next "Don Quijote".
Consequence, make no expensive PR at all, be and attract super elitists that do not mind to spend money for top notch features/experience/customization(!!).

2. Find your niche, stay true to it and slowely grow from there. (privacy, low hw/power requirements, relatively easy to maintain).
Specialise to an extreme level but bring this specialication to the broadest market possible.

3. Plan 10 years ahead wit your rough idea.
Will Smartphones even be relevant then?

Aren't we moving towards a unified device much smaller than that? I humbely "forsaw" the Apple watch 5 years before it materialized because what i ultimately want since childhood is that frickin' "Dick Tracey" meets "Star Trek Communicator" device.
The screens will disconnect from the devics again as we are moving into a world where everything around you will be a possible screen waiting for input from your personal device.
Even Apple is still years away from that and heavily struggeling to "thin out" IOS to turn the watch from early adopters notification system playground into the next killer device.

That also is my only argument on a strategic fail by Jolla apart from "imperfect Communication":
Why did it have to be a tablet...
That sice of a device will soon be a "dump screen" only. The real sustainable challenge for sailfish would have been a watch imho.

Nevertheless i totally enjoy the ride, thank you @stskeeps for being a vital part in that experince and ALL the best of luck for your new endevours!

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Wow, first time hear a convincing (in sincerity, don't share that fascination myself) argument for an e-watch. Always assumed it's just idea-less executives that had to come up with an idea for friday EOD and watch was a no-brainer but also not really convincing (judging by apple watch sales they still need to convince quite a lot of people that current implementation is worth it). Probably with e-glasses and head mounted displays it will work out like star trek/any other sci-fi vision, still prefer to wind it every now and then rather than it dying on me by afternoon (with VR goggles having it have a virtual display with those notifications longer than 15 chars will also help), but those are still just hoops successful e-watch will jump through eventually.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Future will be bright!
Just imagine literally "throwing" the tiny picture from your watch dislay to a giant screen by a gesture starting from your watch, pointing to the big screen / vr google / tablet size screen.
Maaagic :D

Maybe a viable business idea for now could be "being the universal connector/interface between any smart device and any dumb screen. To start with a practial idea not covered by IEEE yet :p

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

I didn't want to bring smartwatches here, since I'm also extremely biased in that topic.... but...

I said, about smartphones:
Well, I'm starting to fill my drawers with smartwatches. And most of them I got as "free devices"...

For some reason many people already believe the form factor to be set in stone.

This reminds me of the pre-iPhone in which many people hated (and I still do) the candybar form factor. And yet after the iPhone you simply _can't_ buy a non-candybar phone.

I.e. I believe that if smartwatches "disrupt" the market they may come in a form factor no one is paying much attention today.

By the way, it's quite probable that once I set my hands on one of these smartwatches with SIM-slot, I'll probably stop carrying a smartphone altogether. What for?

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Well, I use Gnome Shell with 4 desktops in a very similar way.

But the KDE activities, if I understand it correctly, are named and you are kinda expected to create a new activity for any significant task (holiday planing, upcoming talk preparations, coding project foo, etc.) and then remove it once you no longer need it.

But in practice one is usually too lazy to organize stuff like this all the time, so the holiday planing just ends on the "non work desktop", the coding stuff on the "coding desktop", etc.

So basically generic desktops vs desktops for specific tasks.

But as one KDE developer noted on a Plasma Mobile talk I'have visited, activities make a lot more sense for mobile devices - as with the holiday example, you would usually have the mobile device on hand during the holiday, so having various kinds of information ready in a holiday activity makes sense & should be worth the hassle of organizing stuff.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

I am not a user of KDE, so I am not sure of what these activity are usable in practise.

There was a talk at KDE Akademy 2013 (I don't like KDE, but the people being it are great !) about task centric UI. I didn't found the video of it, but found the first part of the slides : http://www.slideshare.net/rcolomar/talk-task-centric. If anyone knows where to find the videos, please let me know.

What I am proposing is related to the principles exposed there, except that the contexte is different.
In KDE talk, they want to produce content, and are proposing how to have predefined workflows to reach it.
In my mind, they workflow would be constructed on the fly, and the flow would be more a matter of automatically organising things in a multitasking environnement (so that the multitasking view would shows tasks, not applications).
This would solve the problems that an app can be used in several simultaneous tasks, but the current UIs are not designed for this, and thus require a lot of going back to switch between things.

You can see a start of this integration in several apps, but it is not generalised. Best example would be camera : You open camera, take a photo, then switch to the gallery, select a photo, send it by mms, write the mms, and send it without leaving the application.
This would normally take 3 apps if it was not integrated, but there you never exit the current one. It also only takes one slot on the multitasking view for this whole chain of event to do this single task. Very Good !

However, in the middle of writing the MMS, you kid/cat/.... does something cute and you want to take another photo. It is not possible !
We have a phone where multitasking is the selling point, but where you cannot take a picture while sending an MMS...
There you should be able to start a new task (a new slot on the multitasking view), which would consist of taking a photo, and then other things that you may decide on the fly, and then getting back to your first MMS.

It is a lot more important on a mobile device than on the desktop, as the tasks done are usually smaller on a phone (not working with an IDE, file broswer and 10 stackoverflow tabs, but simple messaging of data searching), things are mostly full screen compared to multiple windows/screen/virtual desktops on a PC, and finally input system is a big limitation (no mouse and keyboard makes everything slower).


Initial question was to disrupt mobile, not desktop. Putting desktop paradigms in mobile is for me an error, as they are not fulfilling the same needs (even my laptop is not comfortable to do heavy work compared to when it is docked, I don't image doing anything heavy on a phone).

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Implementation is the hard part, as ever.
Take a look at how your desktop internet browser does it:
you can navigate in a single tab forever by following links. At some point, you want to break your flow to split it between to things. You can create a new tab and start doing something in it (even browsing the same websites as the first tab), and you can also follow a link from the first tab in a new tab (middle click).
If you see it that way, it is not difficult nor a burden to the user, as it is decided on the fly with a single action :
* Do whatever you want, you'll stay in the same task flow.
* You want to break from this one ? open in a new flow (long press on the actions?).
* You want to start something else ? create a new flow (a bit like the app launcher while you are in an app).
* Finished with this flow ? close it (swipe down from example).
* Need to switch to another already running flow ? go to the multitask view
(like current left/right swipe)

It has to be done on the fly, not with tagging or virtual desktops where you have to move windows.

But to see it like that we first have to forget the concept of app (where an app has several view, like phone has call history/enter phone number/calling view), and extract all the views to be used by anything/anywhere. At least with some compatibility from one view to the next, like when a picture is taken is can be sent or edited, but not navigated to (geo-tagging of pictures could allows that thinking of it...).

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

It is a USA-centric thinking. In many other countries, smartphones are not heavily-subsidized.