windows and default activity assignment

[Ivan Cukic]

On Tuesday, 30. November 2010. 23.36.15 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Tuesday, November 30, 2010, Ivan Čukić wrote:
> > There are a few things more that need to be done for 4.7:
> > - In 'Advanced Window/Application Settings' - show on specified/all
> > activities - an application should be able to request to be on all
> > activities (because it handles them internally - kmail, kopete..., or
> > don't care at all about them - amarok, yakuake...)
> 
> i agree .. sort of. 
> 
> i really don't think this should be up to apps in an explicit "set on all 
> activities" sense, anymore than how they are displayed in the system tray is

Well, those settings in kwin wouldn't really exist if apps would behave as they should - it would be for /evil/ apps that don't want to support anything related 
to activities.

Amarok and similar is an interesting case - I guess most ppl would want it on all activities, but someone would want it on a specific activity called "Media" or 
something. Further, not every non-document related application should be on all activities. For example, you could use some kind of timer application to 
measure your pay-per-hour job, and in other activities, it shouldn't be present.

> there will always be exceptions. the goal should probably be to get something 
> 95% right with ways to alleviate the occassional incorrect guesses. the gimp 
> is not particularly interesting, tbh: it's document centric, and can 
> stop/start with activities just fine?

The problem I was referring to with gimp is the fact that it has document windows, and tool-windows. By the default logic - document windows will be tied to 
activities, while the toolboxes would be shown always - which would be quite strange :)

BTW, I haven't tried whether gimp works with activity start/stop.
--------

Marco wrote:
> I see it more:
> application says nothing->all activities
> appliction says it's about document -> single activity
> something else -> figure out later

The second line is obvious, but the first  and the last are problematic. The fact an application is not reporting that it is about documents doesn't imply it isn't. So 
the user will get a quite irritating behaviour - some apps disappear when switching activities (KWord) while others, essentially the same (OOo Writer) don't.

The main problem is that we can't expect most non-KDE applications to support activities, while activities need to work consistently with all applications.


Ch




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