Automatic activity switching and other stuff -- thoughts for 4.7
Chani
chanika at gmail.com
Sat Dec 25 14:48:58 CET 2010
>
> this is where having a list of possible triggers would be helpful. we could
> start to detect patterns in them. the last time i did this, nearly every
> single trigger already had a long-running process associated with it, or
> the trigger made no sense unless the application was being used at the
> time anyways (e.g. amarok/banarang/etc having media triggered activities)
>
+1 for brainstorming lists.
we did a bit of that on the train iirc, but I can't remember what we ended up
with...
> and then we need to ask ourselves where is the best place to asy "when i
> switch to this network, i want that activity to show up". there are two
> options that i can think of:
>
> a) connecting activities at the source of the context: so if i want to
> trigger an activity from networking, then i go to the networking tool
>
> b) a central tool for defining activity triggers: probably something like
> the mouse actions configuration only a lot more complex
>
> the benefit of (b) is that we then have one place to gain an overview on
> the configuration and you can see all ways that something can be
> configured. the downside is it may end up being quite complex, both code
> wise and UI wise. the power user in me likes this approach, though ;)
>
> the benefit of (a) is that it is contextual and easy to figure out how to
> set things up -> "when this thing changes, i want to trigger an activity
> change, too". for things like korganizer, i think this is significantly
> easier on the user and the developer.
>
> maybe there's some sort of hybrid approach between the two ...
a thought: global keyboard shortcuts are hybrid, no? you can set them in an
application, but there's also a kcm you can go to to find all of them. it's...
not a UI I would suggest copying, but the general concept is sound.
but then, you'd need a global registry of associations, or a way to ask apps
to list their associations, instead of just having knetworkwhatever calling
suggestActivity(foo).
of course, if you want to go beyond triggering activities and allow other
context-based effects (I dunno, power profile maybe, when I run mplayer?) then
you'll want more of a global framework anyways, with context events and
context... uh.. well, slots? I'm thinking of something vaguely similar to
signals & slots here. but how do you present such power to the user in a non-
scary way?
the programming side could be very easy: you could just say "when you see a
dbus signal like *this*, then call *that* dbus method". it's the UI that's
hard...
--
Chani
http://chani.ca
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