What is your vision for Plasma? It promises to be a revolution, but has also been criticized.

For 4.0.0 we spent most of our time implementing a traditional desktop on Plasma. I believe we need to incrementally approach it otherwise we will lose our audience. In one of the tracks they were talking about a task-oriented environment where your desktop will adjust itself to a task. Your desktop should shift to what you are working on. This is where we are headed with plasma and that is one of the things we will notice - you will be able to have a setup where you are working on a family photo album or a work project and a buddy list changes in response to what you are working on. It allows people to be task oriented. One of the other things is breaking down barriers between applications so instead of having monolithic apps we now have the ability to move things around.

The focus on networking is huge, including the ability to tie in Web servers. The idea is to be able to zoom out and see other defined tasks and have access to shared components on that. How does that affect the user experience? There's the idea of time lining. If I say I want to work on a document at 4pm tomorrow I have to create the task in one application and worse if I want to see when its coming I have to go back into the application. So imagine a little time line you can put anywhere and you can zoom in and out of. So if you want to work on something at 4pm you simply drag it across the timeline. Those kind of widgets and processes change the way people interact with computers. To approach that you need to make it simple and trivial to embed complex widget wherever you want and you need to support svg and access to complex data sources. So that's what we've been working on. I don't think any other desktop is looking at how people are fundamentally working with their machines as they are more focused on applications. Everyone is content to have an icon ghetto for a desktop which is limiting and very narrow minded. It will be interesting to see where it goes but we don't have much competition in that. We can make it so much more efficient to work in KDE with these simple things. No one is really looking at that kind of stuff right now.

With Plasma you will be able to whip up things in JavaScript and take that same thing and put it on a TV, a phone, and put applets embedded in a Web page. If I was crazy I'd say we have something that can challenge Flash in the long term. You can write data engines, runners and Plasmoids in Python and JavaScript. We are lowering the bar for developers and end-users and the end goal is to be able to point and click to an end component. Plasmoids require client side support but can run in a Web browser with a plug-in for Firefox or IE, with database connectivity and interactivity. We've demolished the barriers of what's allowed to be interactive and what isn't.

One of the runners being worked on is one you can teach. It pops up "learn, send an e-mail" so you can tell it what to do. We'll allow people to create bundles and scripts with it. So you can build up your own lexicons and send it to others.

The big news now is that Nokia has acquired Trolltech, how is this likely to effect the KDE project?

As a disclaimer I work for Trolltech. We don't have all the answers of what it will look like in the end, but these conversations will happen over the coming months. Nokia has committed to working with people in the community like myself. A serious conversation needs to happen discussing where it is all going. The optimism is Nokia has shown with their involvement with other free software projects that they get it and they have proven their cred. They are keeping the dual licensing model, so that is really good, and Nokia will become a patron of KDE.

Apple doesn't get the open source development model and has a very control oriented corporate culture

Nokia's nod towards the company and technology is really good evidence that people value and appreciate it. In KDE4 we spent a lot of time breaking up models so there are less dependencies. For example Phonon had a Qt dependency and is now being used by Trolltech. So Nokia will be generating solutions on these technologies and it's in the mobile space which is great. In general I'm cautiously optimistic so now it's a matter of how we execute.