windowgroups / pager / ZUI

[Martin Gräßlin]

Am Samstag 11 Juli 2009 02:25:04 schrieb Sebastian Kügler:
> Forgot to cross-post. Of course this needs to go to kwin at kde.org as well...
>
> On Saturday 11 July 2009 01:20:35 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> > So today during lunch, Chani, Marco, Rich and I were talking about the
> > ZUI and the confusion between the ZUI and  virtual desktops. We came up
> > with a design that would make it less confusing. The idea is to make
> > virtual desktop less zui-like. Virtual desktops are basically groups of
> > windows that can live "on top" of an activity (or rather, a context),
> > they can also be tied to this context.
> >
> > The idea is to remove the zoom-out grid metaphore from virtual desktops,
> > and make it clearer that those are window groups. Instead of adding a
> > window to a virtual desktop, they're tagged with a group. (This can also
> > allow for session saving, saving and starting groups of windows. An
> > activity would have a plasma context and possibly a set of applications.
> > Switching to an activity would switch to this plasma activity and start
> > the set of windows related to this.
> >
> > The desktop grid effect (which zooms out and therefore looks a lot like
> > the ZUI) would be replaced by a column-based layout, much like present
> > windows. You can drag windows from one column to another (effectively
> > moving them from one group to another). The concept of virtual desktops
> > is completely replaced by window groups. Switching between virtual
> > desktops is done like shown in the mockup. A modified present windows
> > effect that groups the windows in columns is used to visualize this.
> >
> >
> > = Example: Work Activity =
> >
> > The email client is started, an office application is started, the
> > desktop contains a folderview with my current project's work document,
> > and some RSS feeds that are relevant to my work.
> >
> >
> > = How does the ZUI look like =
> >
> > The ZUI could have the background of a faded to black current activity,
> > or black. Adding and removing an activity rearranges the activities for
> > optimal space usage (if you search for "gnome shell" on youtube, the
> > first hit gives a nice example how this could look like. (We agreed that
> > the visualization is quite nice, but the concepts are a bit weak since
> > it's not much more than a polished virtual desktop grid).
> >
> > "vdesktop" (in fact windowgroup switcher):
> > 	http://imagebin.ca/view/YXgSWis.html
> >
> > gnome-shell screencast:
> > 	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcpndKUx4pc
> >
> > So much for the braindump from today's lunch session :-) This is quite a
> > departure from the concepts as we're using it now, and I think quite a
> > bit of work to implement. It didn't stop us from talking about this idea
> > of course
> >
> > :-) We can also offer a "traditional/simple mode", much like it's now,
> > : but
> >
> > without ZUI at all. That would just mean keeping what we have now and
> > removing the zoom-out.
The idea sounds completely awesome and I think we should implement it. But 
this will require lots of work and I do not dare to touch any code of it 
before KDE has switched to git.

So I prupose that we start to design the whole thing first and discuss it in 
length during Tokamak III and get some things into techbase. And then I'd say 
we start working on the code after 4.4 and the switch to git. So we could with 
good luck have some things already in 4.5 and with the help from GSoC get that 
really started in 4.6 (yeah that's ambitious).

So let's start by thinking who should be involved in the discussion:
 * plasma
 * kwin
 * usability team
 * GNOME shell (how do they want to implement their activities. Can we get it 
both in a way that switching from GNOME to KDE and vice versa is not a too big 
step in the concept from user point of view)
 * Compiz (with that change and GNOME Shell Compiz would be dead :-( let's at 
least try to not knock them out)
 * anyone missing?
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