Functional Programming in C++

Activities in Switzerland (pun intended)

Published by Ivan Čukić in the KDE development: Activities section, on 26 March 2011

This is a short post about one of the interesting events that is going to happen in Randa this summer.

Usually, multiple developer sprints are not held in the same place at the same time, but now we’re gonna have four very important ones from June, 1st to June, 7th in Randa, Switzerland - Platform 11 (kdelibs and kde platform sprint), Nepomuk, Multimedia and KDevelop.

I’ll have to develop a split personality for this one since I’m planning to get involved in P11 and Nepomuk as well. My main purpose over there will be to finish the activities backends and to push a few things into kdelibs.

Join the evolution

Aaron and Sebastian have already blogged about Platform 11 and the Nepomuk sprint so I’m not going to repeat what they said.

I’m just going to add that if you are interested in smarter handling of recent/favourite documents/web pages etc. based on user’s usage statistics and not only on the last access timestamp, if you want to have the possibility to retrieve documents that are tied to a specific project/task youre working on … and other activity-related stuff, you should join us and get the opportunity to discuss these topics in-person.

You might have noticed that this is the first time activities are a part of a sprint that is not Tokamak (Plasma sprint) - it is due to the fact that we’re expanding :) - the activities are now nicely separated into the libs/data/backends (Platform 11 + Nepomuk sprint) and user interface (Tokamak 5 - soon to be held in Nederlands).

Lars Ivar
I tried activities the other day (I like the concept), but didn't feel that I could utilize it properly. One issue is that Chromium sessions don't appear to be recoverable in the correct activity, and since most of what defines my activities is various web pages, this is important. If rekonq started to be nice to me, that would be an alternative of course.
Apart from that, I suppose I am missing part of what you speak of in this post. Say that I am concentrating on a given programming project - then I would prefer to only let myself be interrupted by mails from that particular project aka a relevant mail filter. Other potential important mails could be part of the more subtle notification mechanics. This notion could then be expanded to IRC channels and so on.
Thinking this made me remember something that do work like this, albeit in a different scope. The Mylyn plugin for Eclipse analysis what you do (tasks, files, etc) and hides from you (files, etc) what you don't currently need.
So to me, a KDE activity is the same as a Mylyn task, just that Mylyn is much more mature, but with a scope at a very different level of detail (KDE activity has a full desktop scope, Mylyn a particular sub task scope, and then normally limited to something happening inside Eclipse).
If you didn't already, it seems like it could be good inspiration for you to look at Mylyn.
http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/
Ivan Čukić
@<a href="#comment-25309" rel="nofollow">Lars Ivar</a>: Well, as far as the things like Chromium are concerned, it will always be difficult, even impossible, to make them behave properly.
Especially when those are using crappy-implemented custom window-decorations. (ok, it can be set to use kwin instead, but people often don't do that)
As far as I can see, mylyn is more for subtasks in a project than for projects. Activities are more for a general project at hand than for a specific task (a specific bug-fix or similar).
If I need to draw a line between how most of us imagine this is that activity is like a session in Kate, Konsole, workspace in Eclipse (I hope I guessed the name right), set of projects in Netbeans or KDevelop etc.
Handling specific task inside a big project (activity) has to remain with the apps themselves since we have no way to determine the purpose of an app and push our behaviour in it.
p.s. But yes, activities should behave like mylyn, but on a larger scale :]

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Ivan Čukić

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Functional Programming in C++

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Activities in Switzerland (pun intended)

Join the evolution

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