RFC: delete icon on activity thumbnail on every activity (except current active one)

[Marco Martin]

On Friday 04 November 2011, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> > right now for how the intergrated look between the delegate and the
> > confirmation dialog is done, if the dialog would be opened in a smaller
> 
> one,
> 
> > will be scaled down as well, making no sense.
> > 
> > and no, i don't want to lose this integrated look making the dialog a
> > separate
> > entity
> 
> That's a problem, which certainly is not solved by using disabled buttons,
> though ;)
> Okay, maybe this is a good place for introducing my vision for error
> prevention
> in Plasma Active (which is not exactly new, though):
> - As already suggested by Fania and seconded by Aaron and me, we want to
> avoid asking the user for confirmation whenever possible.
> - We still have to prevent the user from doing irreversible actions by
> accident,
> though.
> 
> So instead of asking for confirmation for every potentially irreversible
> action,
> shouldn't we aim to make every action reversible? What I have in mind for
> that is the following:
> - Potentially irreversible actions are not carried out immediately.
> Instead the
> system "simulates" the action's execution first. The user then has the
> option
> to revert the action if it was unintentional
>  - To avoid accumulating simulated actions and thus creating an undefined
> overall state, we should either execute it for real after a certain amount
> of time or after a certain amount of following actions (even being able to
> revert only the last action would already work).
> 
> This method works well with actions within applications (imagine a word
> processor asking you to confirm every action like deleting text because
> you
> might have deleted it by accident and cannot get it back!) and is
> widespread
> there. It currently isn't so widespread on the system level, the only
> notable
> exception being filesystem "Trash" folders.
> 
> The only system I know that has this level of reversibility to everything
> is Apple's
> Time Machine.  I don't say we need something that powerful, but the
> essence is pretty useful: You don't have to worry about making mistakes,
> because you can always go back in time to before you made the mistake.
> 
> The advantage is obvious imo: The 99% of acctions which are intentional
> don't
> need to be confirmed, which makes things a lot easier. The 1% potentially
> dangerous unintended actions can still be reversed since you usually
> realize
> a mistake immediately (and if you don't, you would tap "OK" on the confirm
> dialog anyway, so this would have the same effect).
> 
> I'd suggest having one central "Go back in time one action" button. This
> button would be global like SLC and supported by every Active app as well
> as the system itself.
> 
> Then we could do away with any confirmation dialogs (including the one for
> deleting an activity).
> 
> I think confirmation dialogs should be a thing from the past because there
> are much more elegant solutions for error prevention.
> 
> What do you guys think?

this idea is intriguing for sure.
i share the doubts of aaron about the deletion of an activity being a *very* 
serious action.

also, is not really possible to actually undo this action, so something that 
fakes the  deletion would be the activity thumbnail replaced with a message 
"your activity will be deleted next restart" or in 30 minutes or whatever, tap 
here to undo, and the deletion done only when that particular condition, 
timeout of shutdown or whatever happens...

may or may not work, i am not sure..
also needs quite an infrastructure to be done, so "just try and test" doesn't 
really hold since is quite an investment ;)

Cheers,
Marco Martin