hi all ... so i've been piddling away at code-level design work for the activities overview.
and i kept finding myself getting frustrated by it. the ideas are sound (mapping windows to activities, a simple activity switcher...) and yet the word "but" kept coming up in the back of my head. in the shower today i was composing in my head a hypothetical blog entry on what i think of gnome-shell. (i'm getting that question probably once a week right now.) i don't think i'll actually write such a thing in the near future, but it was a really great exercise and i had a "oh .. yeah" moment in the process. to be perfectly blunt, the whole "activities and windows combined overview" topic has been driven at least to some extent by a reaction by some to the previews and demos of gnome-shell. and that's where we got off track. gnome-shell is a panel designed for one segment of users (e.g. those who use IM, among other characteristics) combined with a search driven file and application launcher and a "desktop grid on steroids" composition manager effect that is meant to run on desktop/laptop systems. this is not at all what plasma-desktop, let alone plasma as a whole, is. so what's wrong with the overview thing in gnome-shell? in one word: it's modal. in gnome-shell, i'm either working with an application or i'm working with the desktop shell. when i want to switch from one task to the other, i need to switch the mode the shell is in. i do that by hitting the Applications button which brings up the app/file launcher (whether i want it or not) and gives me a desktop overview (whether i want it or not) and i can now go about managing my applications. the philosophy dualism has never been better served. then i realized that the proposed overview we have dreamed up with window groups and containment thumbnails is essentially the same kind of dualism. it is a mode. in that mode the user must switch from "i'm using the web browser" thinking to "i'm managing the window of this web browser". the whole screen would change. applications would get little dummy representations of themselves drawn in little boxes. i kept thinking "this is really just another form of the tasks widget". we don't do that anywhere else in plasma-desktop, really. the desktop shell frames the applications you are working on and compliments that work. it is visually and interaction-wise distinct from your applications, causing a "this is mine" and "this is the computer's" distinction to become clear (which is also a dualism), but we never create a modality along those lines. they coexist peacefully. to accomplish that peaceful coexistence we have these "shell" and "application" visual identities. so i started asking myself: how can we break this activities overview feature set down so that it is no longer a mode but "melts" into this coexistence? here are some thoughts i had: * in the same panel controller window that we now show the Add Widgets interface, we could show a Choose Activity interface. it would share a lot of presentation code with Add Widgets for consistency. * instead of categories in the tab widget it would have "Active" and "Stored". instead of destroying an Activity, you could store it for later use. these stored Activities would then show up in the Stored section; an rc file and a screenshot pic would be saved to disk for each stored Activity. store and trash would perhaps appear in the hover interface that pops up when the icon is moused over or in a touch based world selected. * a "New Activity" tab would appear Active and Stored and would allow you to create a new activity, including picking what kind of activity and optionally what other activity you would like to clone * associating a Window with an Activity could happen in one of two places: a new button in the window title bar (would mean some adjustment to kwin) that would list activities from nepomuk. the other place would be the context menu of items in the tasks widget * the tasks widget could have an added "show only windows for the current activity" feature * a "hidden windows" button could be shown in the tasks widget when there are hidden-by-activity-change windows around; switching to one of those windows would switch the activity as well? * a "Choose Activity" button would appear in the toolboxes (panel and desktop) * the kwin desktop grid effect would have remove/add buttons added to it to fill the virtual desktop management gap a bit more; we should offer a plasmoid to trigger it and perhaps add it, by default, to the panel * windows associated with an activity could be listed in the mouse over pop up in the Choose Activities interface * in a-containment-per-virtual-desktop mode (which i'm starting to feel small amounts of regret over offering ... but maybe i'm just being pessimistic :) the "Choose Activities" would be per-virtual-desktop. if you wanted to migrate an activity from one desktop to another, you'd have to store it first. the more i think about per-virtual-desktop containments the more i cringe, though. there's probably more than could be done along this line of thinking. any ideas? the basic change in direction is that instead of making it a full on mode a person must switch into to get an overview of things, it becomes part of the overall system that doesn't require you to put away your windows and other tools in the meantime. thoughts? -- Aaron J. Seigo humru othro a kohnu se GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43 KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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