Plasma Automator

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday 16 February 2009, Dario Freddi wrote:
> On lunedì 16 febbraio 2009 18:33:05 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:

ok, putting on my devil's advocate hat:

> > other than network, what external stimulus might this be?
> > how would this work with manually switching activities?
>
> Starting a torrent download -> switching to a particular activity where you
> have download widgets

why would i want it to switch to that activity when i start a torrent? the 
assumption is that starting a torrent means i want to watch it versus do what 
i was doing otherwise? it should be easy to switch to a "torrents" activity 
when i want to quickly check in on their progress, though. what's the trigger 
for that?

> Open a document tagged "Work" in KOffice -> switch to the "Work" activity,
> just two small examples that came to my mind right now.

this definitely belongs in nepomuk. the biggest part of getting this useful 
will be determining when a meaningful context switch is made so that the 
user's environment isn't getting changed on them when they don't expect it or 
want it to.

> Automator will read this file. When the user goes into automator's config
> interface, and creates a new trigger, he will be shown possible context
> change events, through those XML files. So the user will be able to choose
> "Foo triggers its wonderful event". 

my concern is that this is the sort of thing that takes months and months of 
developer effort to get right but which will only be configured to do anything 
by a vanishingly small % of people. which means that it will get broken often 
and clutter the code to the enjoyment of virtually nobody.

i'm really not seeing the use cases for something that is both this flexible 
and user configurable.

> Obviously, it would be great to extend this outer plasma: having somehow
> the whole desktop react through Nepomuk would be even greater, but I'll
> need someone with more expertise here.

that's sort of the goal of Plasma::Context, and the nepomuk people have 
already put a Context object in place. perhaps we should get an irc meeting 
together on this.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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