activities overview, take N

[Shantanu Tushar Jha]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 12:25 AM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:

> hi all ...
>
> so i've been piddling away at code-level design work for the activities
> overview.
>
> and i kept finding myself getting frustrated by it.
>
> the ideas are sound (mapping windows to activities, a simple activity
> switcher...) and yet the word "but" kept coming up in the back of my head.
>
> in the shower today i was composing in my head a hypothetical blog entry on
> what i think of gnome-shell. (i'm getting that question probably once a
> week
> right now.) i don't think i'll actually write such a thing in the near
> future,
> but it was a really great exercise and i had a "oh .. yeah" moment in the
> process.
>
> to be perfectly blunt, the whole "activities and windows combined overview"
> topic has been driven at least to some extent by a reaction by some to the
> previews and demos of gnome-shell. and that's where we got off track.
>
> gnome-shell is a panel designed for one segment of users (e.g. those who
> use
> IM, among other characteristics) combined with a search driven file and
> application launcher and a "desktop grid on steroids" composition manager
> effect that is meant to run on desktop/laptop systems.
>
> this is not at all what plasma-desktop, let alone plasma as a whole, is.
>
> so what's wrong with the overview thing in gnome-shell? in one word: it's
> modal.
>
> in gnome-shell, i'm either working with an application or i'm working with
> the
> desktop shell. when i want to switch from one task to the other, i need to
> switch the mode the shell is in. i do that by hitting the Applications
> button
> which brings up the app/file launcher (whether i want it or not) and gives
> me
> a desktop overview (whether i want it or not) and i can now go about
> managing
> my applications.
>
> the philosophy dualism has never been better served.
>
> then i realized that the proposed overview we have dreamed up with window
> groups and containment thumbnails is essentially the same kind of dualism.
> it
> is a mode.
>
> in that mode the user must switch from "i'm using the web browser" thinking
> to
> "i'm managing the window of this web browser".
>
> the whole screen would change.
>
> applications would get little dummy representations of themselves drawn in
> little boxes. i kept thinking "this is really just another form of the
> tasks
> widget".
>
> we don't do that anywhere else in plasma-desktop, really. the desktop shell
> frames the applications you are working on and compliments that work. it is
> visually and interaction-wise distinct from your applications, causing a
> "this
> is mine" and "this is the computer's" distinction to become clear (which is
> also a dualism), but we never create a modality along those lines. they
> coexist peacefully. to accomplish that peaceful coexistence we have these
> "shell" and "application" visual identities.
>
> so i started asking myself: how can we break this activities overview
> feature
> set down so that it is no longer a mode but "melts" into this coexistence?
>
> here are some thoughts i had:
>
> * in the same panel controller window that we now show the Add Widgets
> interface, we could show a Choose Activity interface. it would share a lot
> of
> presentation code with Add Widgets for consistency.
>
> * instead of categories in the tab widget it would have  "Active" and
> "Stored". instead of destroying an Activity, you could store it for later
> use.
> these stored Activities would then show up in the Stored section; an rc
> file
> and a screenshot pic would be saved to disk for each stored Activity. store
> and trash would perhaps appear in the hover interface that pops up when the
> icon is moused over or in a touch based world selected.
>
> * a "New Activity" tab would appear Active and Stored and would allow you
> to
> create a new activity, including picking what kind of activity and
> optionally
> what other activity you would like to clone
>
> * associating a Window with an Activity could happen in one of two places:
> a
> new button in the window title bar (would mean some adjustment to kwin)
> that
> would list activities from nepomuk. the other place would be the context
> menu
> of items in the tasks widget
>
> * the tasks widget could have an added "show only windows for the current
> activity" feature
>
> * a "hidden windows" button could be shown in the tasks widget when there
> are
> hidden-by-activity-change windows around; switching to one of those windows
> would switch the activity as well?
>
> * a "Choose Activity" button would appear in the toolboxes (panel and
> desktop)
>
+1
Right now I've to manually do this by adding an activity switcher to a new
panel.


>
> * the kwin desktop grid effect would have remove/add buttons added to it to
> fill the virtual desktop management gap a bit more; we should offer a
> plasmoid
> to trigger it and perhaps add it, by default, to the panel
>
> * windows associated with an activity could be listed in the mouse over pop
> up
> in the Choose Activities interface
>
> * in a-containment-per-virtual-desktop mode (which i'm starting to feel
> small
> amounts of regret over offering ... but maybe i'm just being pessimistic :)
> the "Choose Activities" would be per-virtual-desktop. if you wanted to
> migrate
> an activity from one desktop to another, you'd have to store it first. the
> more i think about per-virtual-desktop containments the more i cringe,
> though.
>
>
Maybe not exactly related to this thread, but still something I'd like to
mention-
The concept of virtual desktops and activities being separate is something
I've seen beginners feel rather confusing. Seeing the word "desktop", it
gives the impression of desktop=wallpaper+applets and when switching
desktops doesn't change the applets (and changing activities does), it gets
confusing. I remember there was some idea of replacing virtual desktops with
kind of a "window grouping" concept. It will be great and avoids this
confusion. I wonder what happened to the idea ..


> there's probably more than could be done along this line of thinking. any
> ideas?
>
> the basic change in direction is that instead of making it a full on mode a
> person must switch into to get an overview of things, it becomes part of
> the
> overall system that doesn't require you to put away your windows and other
> tools in the meantime.
>
> thoughts?
>
> --
> 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 Development Frameworks
>
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>
>


-- 
Shantanu Tushar    (UTC +0530)
http://www.shantanutushar.com
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