I had an unfortunate intermission in kactivities development due to a hard drive failure.

Fortunately, I managed to salvage significant parts of my work, but without git history. Now, it is ready for prime-time.

You are now able to access the activity manager without the need for the ‘clumsy’ activities data-engine. Just import org.kde.activities and create an instance of the ActivityModel.

import org.kde.activities 0.1 as Activities

ListView {
  id: main

  model: modelMain

  Activities.ActivityModel {
      id: modelMain
  }
}

But, this is not all. You are not limited only to retrieve the data, it is also possible to create, delete or alter them. The service control API is asynchronous. Therefore, all methods, apart from regular arguments, receive a continuation function that is called when the method is executed.

Something along these lines:

modelMain.setCurrentActivity(idOfTheActivity,
  function(result) {
    console.log("Activity switched")
  }
)

modelMain.createActivity(nameForTheActivity,
  function(result) {
    console.log("Activity id is: " + result)
  }
)

Well, that is all for now. I’m thinking of adding overloads without callbacks, but these methods are not really meant to be called by everybody, so I’m not sure how important a more pleasant API actually is. :)

I’ve been irritated for the way a QSqlQuery result-set is supposed to be processed for some time now - with while(query.next()) and getting the results via query.value(…). I was always thinking it would be nice if it were more accessible… namely, accessible using iterators.

To be able to do something like this:

for (auto &record: query) {
    // do something with
    record[0]
    // or
    record["ID"]
}

You have a simple .h file to include, and it will just work. [1]

{% gist 7346513 %}

The issue is that it is only tailored to match only this use-case - it can be improved to do more, and to allow more iterators over the same query, but I don’t really care to do that :)

[1] https://gist.github.com/ivan-cukic/7346513

I have a few questions that I’d like to hear an answer to from a wider user (and developer) community. Those revolve around the activity switching UI and the things it could have in plasma 2.

Currently, the switcher shows the name and the icon of an activity, and allows you to:

• switch activities (duh)
• create / delete activities
• start / stop activities
• change the name and icon

This is rather rudimentary. We have more information for the activities that somebody could find useful. We know:

• which windows are currently open in an activity
• which documents are open in an activity (for applications that support that kind of thing)
• which documents have been opened in an activity in the past, along with which were most popular (kept open the longest, accessed multiple times etc.)
• what is the wallpaper in the current activity, for running activities maybe even the screenshots of the windows

These are some of the things we could have:

• marking activity as private in the sense of the private mode web browsing which would stop the usage tracking, etc. (not to be confused with encrypted activities we planned for Plasma Active which proved to be infeasible)
• instead of creating blank or templated activities, we could optionally create activities containing the work from the last hour or so. This would move the windows and documents you are currently working on to the new activity (and move all the related recent usage statistics along with them)
• some kind of search (for what?)

All comments on above, ideas for new things and even mock-ups are welcome!

I am coming close to adding boost.range as a dependency to non-library parts of KActivities.

Every time I have to filter out a list, join the elements in a non-standard manner.

So far, I am resisting the temptation, but I have no clue for how long I will be able to manage it :)

I’m working on different ideas for the activity switcher for plasma 2. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much inspiration for that. The only thing I had a real inspiration for was the calendar.

I really dislike out current calendar widget. It is confusing, and the layout is overcrowded and asymmetric (in a bad way :) ). It often confuses me when it shows events - I always think everything is today.

So I made this. It is just a mock-up, no real code yet. Opinions?