Plasma Automator

[Dario Freddi]

Hello everyone,

I am introducing you an idea me and Riccardo thought about some time ago. I 
tried to talk about that to Aaron during Tokamak but for some reason we didn't 
manage to talk. So I'm reporting it here.

The idea was about automatizing Plasma behavior based on how other 
applications/components behaves. To make it clear, I'll make an example:

You come home with your laptop, and you're just back from work. Your current 
desktop activity is, of course, set to "work". You open the laptop, and you 
get connected to your WiFi network. Solid recognizes this, and streams the new 
current network over DBus.

You set a preference in automator that switches your activity to "Home" when 
you get connected to your own wifi. So automator catches the signal, switches 
activity, and notifies you.

That's just an example: there are a lot of possibilities. In my mind, a 
possible interface could be something like defining a mail filter: connect an 
action to another; call it a very high level signal-slot mechanism, if you 
like.

Applications could expose their DBus signals through XML files, that will let 
automator catch a variety of events. So every developer can hook its 
application into automator with a very minimum effort, supposed that its 
application is already exposed in DBus.

About implementation, we thought about a KDED module, that seems the most 
sensible solution.

I'd like to hear your opinions on this, if you like the idea and/or you would 
change something in it. I am also thinking about, given the current period, to 
propose this as my GSOC project, and some more opinions on that would be 
appreciated too.

Cheers
Dario

-- 
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Dario Freddi
KDE Developer
GPG Key Signature: 511A9A3B

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