Automatic activity switching and other stuff -- thoughts for 4.7

[Ryan Rix]

Hey all,

Long mail follows, sorry. Really only of interest to Chani, Aaron, Ivan and 
other activity folks... :)

My goal was to bring this up for 4.6 but herp derp, I didn't, so here we go. 

I've been thinking a lot about how to give the Activity Manager a way to 
predict what a user would like to be doing at a certain time, based on 
external input, whether that's things like current GPS coordinates, what is 
scheduled in KOrganizer right now, etc. What follows is a braindump of crap 
I've been contemplating since before akademy, and it may well not make any 
sense.

Basically, I'm trying to answer a simple question: "what would cause a user to 
change what they are doing (their activity), and can we monitor those events 
to facilitate this change for them?":

Susan tags her workplace in Marble (or wherever) with the Nepomuk tag "work". 
The manager tracks Susan's current location via the Plasma geolocation 
dataengine and when it detects that Susan has arrived at work, changes the 
current activity to the activity associated with the "work" Nepomuk tag.

Terrance has different activities for each of his university courses. When he 
adds homework assignments or adds his class schedule to KOrganizer, he tags 
each event with the specified class, as well as asking the manager to switch 
to the associated activity when the event occurs. When the event occurs, the  
manager automatically switches to the activity associated with the Nepomuk tag 
Terrance has associated with the event.

etc... Makes sense, no? I have some other use cases, but I won't copypasta 
them here, for sanity's sake.

There is also the choice of making something like this wider than this, 
controlling notifications status ("presentation mode"), etc... All of this 
falls in to this sort of "predict what the user wants to do" idea, but not so 
much with Activities as we know them.

So, basically we end up with two things:
* What would cause a user to change what they are doing?
* How would they change what they are doing?

So, we end up with two lists of "things" -- plugins. What kind of API should 
these plugins be expected to have and what should they expect to be able to 
do? 

Then comes the question of how to implement something like this.... Fun. Do we 
do it in kactivitymanagerd? In its own daemon? kded plugin?

Next, where are we with the symbiosis between Nepomuk and the Activities 
infrastructure? Both of the usecases I described above use Nepomuk tags; they 
don't have to, but it's a decision we'd have to make before jumping in to 
writing some code like this -- do we use Nepomuk tags, or do we hardcode to 
Activities or whatever resource the plugin manipulates...?

I'd like to start a dialog on this, and have something to show for 4.7 this 
time around. I've pissed around on this for nearly six months, and have a lot 
of nice ideas, just need to see how viable they are and how much they make 
sense.

Lots of love,
Ryan
-- 
Ryan Rix
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