The idea behind Contour

What is Contour all about?



Well, the Contour project wants to create a context-sensitive user interface. That means a UI that adapts to your current context, your current activities and your behavioral patterns. All this to create a smarter user experience that enables and helps you to fulfill your tasks more efficient and with more fun. Currently we are developing on ideapads and wetabs, but the final version is aimed to run cross-device like on tablet computers, media centers, smartphones etc.

What is the new thing about Contour?

Information + Actions = Activity

information on the system is connected with actions

the user chooses those activities instead of applications like on standard devices

the system learns and analyzes the usage patterns (actions and events) over time

Smart recommendations

the system provides dynamic data based on those patterns and on the current context

the analysis and rating of the actions happen over the whole timeline (past, present and future)

within that rating, big changes in the user’s behavior are taken into account as well

Concept

Context is defined by geo location, time, current activity, active files and applications, recent action history

Patterns are regular actions of the user in similar contexts

Activities are the static part of the user interface that contains resources, actions and applications

Recommendations are propositions for actions that are dynamically changing to context, based on the detected patterns

Interface Design?

The answer how all this is actually presented in the UI, will give you the next postings. Curious people can already find out a bit more on our KDE page: http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Contour/Screenshots