activities

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On February 5, 2010, Marco Martin wrote:
> what i see as the "real" one is the nepomuk one, the plasma ones i see more
> as "placeholders" or "visual representations" of activities
> (i would even tempted to ditch that at all and make widgets in the same
> containment behave differently when the activity chnges but that would add
> even more complexity if the current containment was not tied to activities)

widgets are intended to behave differently depending on the active context, 
but it is assumed that we would keep the context and the containment 
consistent with each other. 

what you are suggesting is being able to change the context without changing 
the containment itself. this is only useful if the user wants the exact same 
set of widgets.

it would also mean we'd have some abstract concept of activities (see the 
Concentrate video Ivan linked to for an example of that) and i just don't 
think that's very approachable.

yes, we could make containment<->context paring exceptionally powerful and 
flexible. the question is whether that would end up being used by more or less 
of our users as a result.

> soo, the containment would be the perfect thing to visualize an activity,
> there is only the multimonitor and the pervirtualmonstruosity that breaks
> this perfect paradigm :/ so indeed an activity must become a -set-
>  of containments.

Context already does this; for PVDA one solution might be to link all the 
containments together. with the ZUI gone, this becomes less problematic, but 
it does mean that changing the desktop containment on one virtual desktop 
would change them on all virtual desktops unless we offered some "just change 
this one containment, but not the context" method. not sure that's worth it.

> note that the pervirtualmonstruosity wouldn't be a problem anymore if we
> take the route of an activity is a virtual desktop

right. we'd just end up with a different set of warts.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
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