Here in Cybercom we have couple of ongoing Qt and QML demo projects. The first one is called Multilayer Parallax Desktop. The idea that we have been playing around is that why to limit a desktop to have only a one layer as  it usually is in desktop environments. Instead, we can have multiple layers. In real life you can of course have virtual desktops and gain the same idea, but as a demo perspective, having a multiple layers in a desktop is an interesting concept.

Let’s show the video first…

And if you are interested in to try the demo yourself. Try to find us from the MeeGo Conference. You can always send a tweet to cybercomchannel, kypeli or zchydem if you have difficulties locate us:)

The Desktop

The desktop in multilayer parallax demo is a wide desktop so you can pan it to the left or right. The one idea is that you can have plenty of widgets. Yes, this is not a new thing to have widgets on a desktop. The layer approach gives you a new feature – you can zoom in  and zoom out between the layers which give you even more space for widgets.

As shown on the video, you can quite easily navigate between layers either using the carousel pager on the left side of the home screen or you can tap any widget on a different layer which switches the current layer to the widget’s layer.

Application Management

You can launch applications by tapping a top bar which opens an application menu. You can close the menu by tapping outside the icons. Tapping a menu icon opens the application. Applications can’t be closed directly when they are shown in a fullscreen. First you need to minimize the application from application’s top bar and after the it has been minimized, the application can be closed by tapping the X icon from a task switcher. Naturally the applications can be maximized from the task switcher too.

Widget Management

Widgets can be added, moved or removed only in edit mode which can be activated with a long press on top of the desktop. The edit mode is indicated by highlighted carousel pager and with a trash can which appears only in the edit mode. You can add new widgets from a top bar which shows available widgets. Removing a widget is done by dragging the widget on top of trash can. Navigation between layers in the edit mode can be done by using the carousel pager or by tapping a widget on a different layer.

About the Multilayer Parallax Desktop Demo

The demo runs on a MeeGo netbook with Qt 4.7.1. It’s fully implemented with QML (yes, there is C++ too, but it’s only a main.cpp) and it took less than two weeks to make it to the shape you saw on the video. We have plans to improve it a lot in the future. For example to make it support gestures and more multimedia features. Let’s see how it evolves, but it’s amazing how fast you can implement pretty cool looking concept UIs with bunch of functionalities just in two weeks.