Scopes current and future

vadrian89 · 19 Jan 2018, 17:47

I was thinking on scopes and want to open a discussion about the current state of them and possibility for future.
I was thinking that the scopes could be QML applications simply loaded inside an Qt/QML application.
This could bring a lot of scopes opportunities:

any QML app can be set as scope and be at the user's fingertips
a lot of UI customisation possibilities
webapps can be loaded as scopes through WebView / WebEngine to support HTML / Javascript scopes
they can interract with the OS instead of just providing static content
support is provided through Qt updates

Downside:

no support for Golang

How scopes are built now lack a lot, you have little customisation and little freedom for them and they can't do anything but show some information.
They could be given the option to be started / closed when they get focused / hidden through QML Loader to reduce memory footprint or kept always on, in case someone wants to leave it running(a music player scope can be given as example).

I wasn't sure where this could be discussed, so since this comes into user experience(more or less) I thought here it's the best place to do it.
What do you think?

matteo · 19 Jan 2018, 18:56

I'm a fan of scopes and if your proposal is to give them new life, well be my guest. Unfortunately, I cannot dig more into your thoughts since I'm not a developer, but it sounds good to me and I definitely support your idea!

Mitu · 19 Jan 2018, 22:09

@vadrian89 said in Scopes current and future:

any QML app can be set as scope and be at the user's fingertips
webapps can be loaded as scopes through WebView / WebEngine to support HTML / Javascript scopes

This is definitely not a good idea in my opinion. Apps' navigation patterns would interfere with desktop navigation, what would mean that having set unav as a scope you would not be able to swipe between desktops.

Scopes definitely need their API standards, and some limits in the functionality, so that they could be fast, safe and not breaking the Ubuntu's UX.

Of course what scopes are and how they work is definitely what shoud be rethought and redone, but still "whatever" is not the right answer.

vadrian89 · 20 Jan 2018, 08:11

@mitu said in Scopes current and future:

This is definitely not a good idea in my opinion. Apps' navigation patterns would interfere with desktop navigation, what would mean that having set unav as a scope you would not be able to swipe between desktops.

I am not talking about the possibility of allowing every application to run as scopes.
There can and should be standards to allow this feature, for example:

an application should be a pure QML application which doesn't start from an executable file, but from a QML file(where the main view of the application is loaded through Loader to MainView and not declared as a child of it to decouple from it)
there should be a standard to communicate to the system that it can be loaded as a scope, and which QML file should be the main view of the scope.

If I will have the time I will try to make a desktop prototype for testing to show what I am talking about.

Mitu · 21 Jan 2018, 13:15

It still won't solve the navigation pattern conflitcts though. I still think that even pure QML apps as scopes are an overkill for both performance and UX reasons.

The current concept of what scopes are is not bad - they just need to be faster, more flexible and dynamic.