Ivan Čukić

dr Ivan Čukić

Author of "Functional Programming in C++", KDE developer and Free/Libre software enthusiast

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Brainstorms for the activities in the desktop plasma needed

Published by Ivan Čukić in the KDE development: Plasma section, on 10 May 2012

I’m no longer sponsored by basysKom to work on Active (the Contour project ended), so I can focus some of my coding to the desktop. Most of the things I’ve been doing are independent from Plasma Active, but had a small UI overlay written specifically for it.

Now is the time to bring some of the features that proved to be useful to common Plasma users, and, for this, I’ll need help from everyone, be it brainstorming or even coding. This post is meant to introduce to you what technologies are going to be available to build upon.

You should post all your ideas to the KDE Workspace Vision part of our forums.

Linking the documents to activities

Background: One of the purposes of activities is to link documents (including web pages, images, etc.), applications, contacts etc. that are related to the activity so that you can access them faster. Apart from manually telling the system which resources belong to an activity, the goal is to have the system score the documents based on the number of times you’ve used them in a specific activity*.

So here are some of the ideas I plan to make reality.

Manual linking of files by right-clicking them in dolphin.
Linking via Share-Like-Connect applet - eventually, when most of our applications get patched to report the documents they open to the activity manager, we’ll know which document is in focus at any given time. This way, we’ll have global (in the panel) buttons to share the document, bookmark it, link it to the activity.
Linking contacts from Kontact, Telepathy and similar
Linking the highest scored documents automatically or semi-automatically
Have the favourite applications section in menus dependent on the activity
Rank krunner results according to the scores
Browsing the resources that belong to the activity with Dolphin (and file open/save dialogue)
Showing all that in the Shelf applet
actually, it is a little bit more complex than that, but it is irrelevant for this purpose.

Other simpler things

System settings module for advanced activity configuration - the name and icon setup plasma provides is a bit underwhelming
Setting the basic activity info, creating and deleting
Setting whether the activity is private (requires a password to be unlocked, data is encrypted) - see Encryption in KDE SC
Setting whether the usage statistics should not be collected in a specific activity at all, or only for certain applications

Dreams

Automatic grouping of documents that relate to each other based on the usage statistics (for example, the literature you used while writing a scientific paper)
…

Help

So, the thing that I need from all of our awesome users is to polish these ideas, create new and more awesome ones, etc.

Comments:

Ivan Čukić
@<a href="#comment-27202" rel="nofollow">Greg Batmarx</a>: 2) Never saw the usefulness of the cube effect. IMO, it is a restricted (3 VD max at a time shown) representation and only there to draw 'wow's from the passer bys.
Activities can not be shown that way for multiple reasons - activities can have multiple VDs - if activity is not running, we can't show an image of it (one of the reasons we went for icons to represent them)
3) That'd be *very* nice. And it is possible to implement, just very hard (it would be a *big* task).
Ivan Čukić
Well, we can't know which window is a window that has a systray icon. I do agree that this needs to be solved.
The special window setting is something that was planned, but not yet implemented. I'll try to do that for 4.9.
Separating favs, recents... yeah :)
Panels, possibly - but not me. That is going to open a can of worms, and I already have a lot of complex stuff to maintain.
Norman
What I really would love, is to be able to set the entries in KFilePlaces to specific activities. I don´t want to see some network-folders or my Eclipse-workspace on my home activity. And on the other side, I don´t want to see my linked NAS-Folders from home at my work activity.
There already exists a patch on the review board. I used it for a while and it worked fine. But since some changes on the activites at 4.8, the patch also needs to be modified.
Martin Steigerwald
1) A better way to switch between activities. The activies switcher plasmoid which display activities by name beneath each other is pretty basic. I currently use it but as an overlay panel that comes out when I move to the screen border where my permanent panel resides (top of screen). This somewhat works, sometimes I accidentally trigger the overlay panel. Mouse wheel on desktop only works when desktop is not cluttered completely by windows usw. I would like a global keyboard shortcut like Alt-Tab oder Ctrl+F1-F12 but for activities. And maybe a more sophisticated activity list plamoid.
2) The activity manager plasmoid: Pressing play for an activity should not only switch plasma background, but also windows. Currently windows of the current activity remains shown.
3) Pinning windows to activies by context menu of window is awkward. I am not sure about a better way. Maybe have some activity wheel like in Plasma Active and be able to drag windows onto activities and also a space for "all activities"?
4) I have a gaming activity. Even when I stopped it the Konsole process I have on it was still there.
5) Save current state of the activity manually or in regular intervals to protect again crashed sessions.
6) Really make sure that kwin will only show the windows on the current activity.
7) Possibility to have the same application on different activities with different state. I.e. KMail showing different folders and such. The infrastructure for this if not already there and one example applications or documentation to do this for other apps as well.
Ivan Čukić
@<a href="#comment-27197" rel="nofollow">Norman</a>: The problem with the patch in question is that kdelibs are frozen until KDE Frameworks 5 are finished.
So, no new features can go into it.@<a href="#comment-27198" rel="nofollow">Martin Steigerwald</a>: 1) You can set up the switching shortcuts, there are even default ones, but I can't remember which those are since I tend to change most of them.
2) Hmh... that is a strange behaviour - when you switch activities, only the windows that belong to the current activity should be shown.
3) A nice idea. Don't know how implementable it is though. You should post it to KDE Forums to get more feedback.
4) I don't get your point
5) Not really possible - the session management protocol is not meant even for the things we currently do - and therefore it has quite a few bugs. If we did this, it would get even worse. (although I like the idea very much)
6) For me it does. Either windows associated with the current activity or the windows associated with all activities. Guess there's some bug you've encountered.
7) That one is also the ultimate goal - forgot to add it in the 'Dreams' section.
Greg Batmarx
1)Different panels per activity. This is a broadly requested feature that will provide higher functionality. It is a feature that can be implemented as an option as it applies to different widgets in different workspaces.
2) Activity cube. Imagine a combination of grid and cube!Each side of the cube will have the grind of the workspaces of each activity. So rotating this cube we can see all the different activities each with its own set of virtual workspaces! This could be fantastic!
3)Saving easily one activity and even sharing it!
The concept of activities is the best thing that happened to KDE!Deepen it and empower it!
Stan aka 'Xeno'
First, i'd love to see change of default behaviour of clicked program icons in task managers/systray from "switch to the n activity (where window is displayed)" to show window i n current activity.
I't quite annoying when I try to call amarok/kopete window and get my activity switched. If we want to hide apps from other activites, task managers should show windows only from current activity by default
Apps in tray should (imho) be pinned to all activites, unless there'd be some kind of special rule (similar to the vdesktop placement rules) that pins given app to particluar activity.
Separate favourite apps, recent aps/docs and bookmarks for each activity.
and absolute pipe dream: per activity panels config.
Norman
It would be nice to to be able to set specific notification settings for each activity.
For example, I don't want notifications from messenger or mails, when I watch videos on my media-activity or when I'm on my study-activity. But when I'm on my work- or home-activity, I want to get these notifications.
The settings could be realised similar like its done with the activity-aware power settings in 4.8. The already existing view for systemwide default settings, and then a view for specific activity settings.
Stan aka 'Xeno'
Another thing that would be quite simple, per-activity fav places.
TheBlackCat
There are a few things I think are needed, although not directly related to documents:
1. Be able to tie applications more thoroughly to activities. First, be able to assign an application to always open when the activity is started (after boot or after stopping and starting an activity). Second, be able to assign an application so that when it is opened manually, it automatically opens in a particular activity.
2. Be able to move applications between activities. Currently it takes 4 clicks and a lot of mouse movement to move an application to another activity, because first you need to enable it on another activity, then disable it on the current one.
3. Have a full-featured full-screen activity manager. The small bar makes sense for plasmoids because you need enough room to drag the plasmoid to the desired position. But in most cases when switching between activities there is no need to be able to interact with the desktop.
4. Have the "recent documents" list in applications be activity-aware, so it only shows (or at least prioritizes) files from the current activity (this may be obvious, but it wasn't on the list).
5. Have "create new" be activity-aware. For instance Dolphin has a "Create new" that allows you to create a documents of a particular type. Lancelot has a similar ability. This should be activity aware, so it only shows (or at least prioritizes) file types relevant to the current activity.
6. This may happen automatically since they are technically files, but please make sure all the stuff you listed with files also apply to folders.
7. It would be great if we could have specific folder collections that are activity-aware. Windows 7 has a feature called collections that let you have a virtual folder that includes all the files in one or more real folders. This could be extended in KDE with activities, so which folders are shown in the collection depends on activities. So for instance you could have a single documents collection, but which folders it includes depends on your activity.
Ivan Čukić
@<a href="#comment-27217" rel="nofollow">TheBlackCat</a>: 1, 4, 5, 6, 7 - already under way.
2 and 3 - You should get a specific idea how would you do it and post the ideas on the forums <a href="http://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=226" rel="nofollow">http://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=226</a>.