activities

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On February 5, 2010, Diego Moya wrote:
> The current problem with VDs and activities is, they are conflicting
> spatial metaphors. They both are using the plane surface in two
> different inconsistent ways. If I'm working with a set of windows and
> go to the right (either with the "rotating cube" or "viewport
> horizontal shift" effect), it will change windows as I enter in a new
> virtual desktop. But if I zoom out and zoom in to the right of the
> initial workspace, it will change activity instead - same windows but
> different background.

plasma-desktop's zooming is already gone in trunk.

> See how it doesn't make sense? The zooming interface is not the one to
> blame for confusion - several popular implementations (the iPhone, for
> example) show that the general public is not confused by it. But the
> same relative movement arriving to different places? That's a no-no.

it's not just that. it's also the fact that zooming performance of 
QGraphicsView as we were using it is very poor on x11, meaning we weren't able 
to do nice transitions. we were also doing it without any cooperation with the 
window manager, which didn't help anything.

add to this things like PVDA and syncronizing activities across all of them 
while zooming, etc, etc.....

anyways, moot point, because we won't be using zooming for the plasma-desktop 
desktop containments.

> What I think should be done is moving the activities to the Z axis.
> This is a proven metaphor - windows already behave this way (a window
> is the 70's portrayal of an activity - a set of tools designed to work
> together). Since activities have a strong linkage to the desktop, I
> suggest a metaphor of activities as a pile of desktops along the 3rd
> dimension, one of top of the other.

i don't see how this would make anything clearer, tbh.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
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KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks