apps: launching/switching/adding to activities

[Marco Martin]

Hi all,

there is a pretty big area of the ui that has been just flat out ignored right 
now:
* switching running applications
* browsing/launching applications
and, as connected thing, browsing application launchers is the way to connect 
lauchers to the current activity.

at tokamak we already had a design session about all of this, the idea was 
basically to put the window switcher and the launcher in the panel, that can 
be pulled down to reveal the hidden parts. 

I gave a try with a slightly different approach:
instead of pulling the panel (with its icons that would move, and would seem 
strange)
you pull a window *from* the panel:
http://i.imgur.com/37ESf.png

the space there is scarce, but there are both tasks and the application 
laucher in order to not have too many pieces of ui that are triggered in 
slightly different ways

the tasks are in an horizontal strip (the window has a 100% width for a 
limitation in the kwin effect right now)
the applications in a paged icon grid (the same component as the widget 
explorer) that can filter applications as categories with a tag cloud rather 
than fixed categories as usual (in the screenshot is enormous, but on a tablet 
the size should be way smaller)

the launcher supports krunner, so can search both applications and any file 
indexed by nepomuk, so it could have the slc context menu and be the primary 
way to connect files and application lauchers to the activities

all of this is still very very rough, but a good base for a discussion.

Cheers,
Marco Martin