activities

[Chani]

> >  So while in theory it makes sense to be able to merge vdesktops with
> > 
> > activities, in reality it'd end up feeling awkward and hacky. :(
> 
> And not really possible. For example, one might want to have more virtual
> desktops in one activity (when I say 'one' in this case I mean 'at least
> me'

and me, and aaron, and several people at my school... I want to keep that use-
case too :) I'm just not sure it's suitable for everyone.

> 
> The second problem in using vdesktops and accompanying kwin effects to
> represent activities is that we'd have to have all activities 'in memory'
> at the same time to be able to show them which is *wrong*.
> 
> I'd rather have a list of activities with 'activate this one' than to have
> the /live/ previews of them. And this would be a rather simple approach
> for the implementation - when the activity is changed, the applications
> that care about it would listen to the signal.
> 
> - session manager would load apropriate applications
> - kwin would activate the desired virtual desktops (if we want different
> number of vds per activity)
> - plasma would change the widgets
> - menus would change the favourite apps
> - dolphin would change /places/...
> 
> Mind that I'm working with the presumption of having only one activity
> dubbed 'current' at a time like discussed before (at T3).

one activity will be "current", yes, but you can have more than one open at a 
time. you don't quit an application when you hit alt-tab, after all. :)
there'll be the current activity, the other running activites, and the other 
closed actvities.
I figure the UI will probably show the closed activities separately... although 
if someone wants to play with a widget that lists all of them together and 
does some sort of automagical opening & closing, feel free :)

...remember, though, that the session support will take time, and will never 
be 100% (think proprietary niche applications). so, closing an activity might 
be a potentially destructive action.


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