activities

[Ivan Čukić]

> We seem to have two or three definitions of the word "activity" in kdebase
> now. Oops.
> First, there's the original: desktop containments.
> Second, there's the nepomuk activities: they're UIDs that can have an
> associated name, and then other arbitrary things can be associated with
> them. Third, there's my "everything you need for what you're working on"

The Nepomuk activities - as in UIDs/nepomuk-resources-provided-by-the-
activities-service - are the base for the "everything you need for what you're 
working on", so those two terms are not really colliding - they do represent 
the same thing. (the activities service is developed for use in 
kwin/plasma/apps/...)

Plasma Containments, on the other hand, don't. /Fortunately/, the term 
Activity is a user-space term, so we don't have it in the code and it is 
replaceable.

>  So while in theory it makes sense to be able to merge vdesktops with
> activities, in reality it'd end up feeling awkward and hacky. :(

And not really possible. For example, one might want to have more virtual 
desktops in one activity (when I say 'one' in this case I mean 'at least me' 
:) ).

The second problem in using vdesktops and accompanying kwin effects to 
represent activities is that we'd have to have all activities 'in memory' at 
the same time to be able to show them which is *wrong*.

I'd rather have a list of activities with 'activate this one' than to have the 
/live/ previews of them. And this would be a rather simple approach for the 
implementation - when the activity is changed, the applications that care 
about it would listen to the signal.

- session manager would load apropriate applications
- kwin would activate the desired virtual desktops (if we want different number
of vds per activity)
- plasma would change the widgets
- menus would change the favourite apps
- dolphin would change /places/...

Mind that I'm working with the presumption of having only one activity dubbed 
'current' at a time like discussed before (at T3).

> so, yeah, two open issues I'd like feedback on:
> how can we make activities simple and non-threatening to the new user?

> what do we do about a dual-monitor computer having two activities
> (desktopcontainments) for each activity (in nepomuk)?

Code-wise, it is possible for multiple containments to share the same Context, 
as panels will share the global-currently-active-activity-context.


I've received a link to an application called Concentrate, that aims to do for 
Mac what we are doing here. I'm not really satisfied by its ui and configuration 
dialogue, but it is worth taking a look at it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ojXcMJTIk&feature=related


--
There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.
  -- Louis Pasteur