Activities, widgets, resources

[Marco Martin]

Hi all,

I'm writing this because i feel it's an area that should be a bit more 
precisely defined, on both technical and UI point of views.
So activities, what are they? entities that are bookeeped by the activity 
manager daemon, that knows what are all of them and what is running.. 
applications can associate "stuff" to them.. Nepomuk can associate resources, 
KWin windows, Plasma Containments.

How to represent them in Plasma..
As said, in plasma 1 activity = 1 containment (in plasma-desktop not always, 
but not relevant there ;), with all widgets inside the containment.

In Contour, what is central of the concept of activities is the resources.
In the main plasma "desktop" is possible to search for resources with free 
text queries (-maybe- some kind of facets browsing coming as well), and 
associate resources with activities.
they are visualized in boxes, one box per resource type (document, contact, 
bookmark...) and the initial idea was to have some qctivities with resources, 
some with widgets, as separate entities.

Now, this may or may not have something to do with classical widgets, at the 
moment it's just a containment with no applets in it, that creates those boxes 
with QML list views and repeaters.

A feedback I received now several times, (and i think it quite makes sense) is 
the possibility of freely rearrange those boxes, and even bragging items 
between boxes. now, since that is basically a list view isn't too much 
suitable for it, what would need is saving and loading position layouts of 
those boxes...

Thos pretty much suggests a thing... let them be Applets :)

Is obvious that while it would have advantages, it would have disadvantages as 
well:

pros:
* easy to rearrange groups
* easy to rearrange items in groups and in between groups (sort of)
* possible to mix them with normal plasmoids (this is really something i would 
have in the end, makes sense quite a lot on a "semantic" level)

cons:
* possible to remove all the groups (without actually removing the association 
with the activity)
* necessary to add the groups, one by one for each resource type
* auto creating groups as results of search queries loses meaning

Basically, the biggest disadvantage i see right now is that doesn't really 
make sense to dynamically create applets as a result of a query ;)

another way i tought of, was to have just a boring list of the resources on a 
side of the screen, or in a particular plasmoid (here the word "krunner"  
comes to mind..), then they can be individually dragged in the main area, in 
appropriate plasmoids, disadvantage would be having more places where the same 
resource is represented..

Maybe I'm overengineering here, but wouldn't reimplement the plasma layout 
load and save inside a plasmoid for something different ;)

Opinions? comments?

Cheers, 
Marco Martin