Where We’re Going

Since last Akademy, several plasma people have been thinking about activities, and virtual desktops, and What It All Really Means. We had some good discussions at akademy, and at tokamak, and online too. KWin and Nepomuk people were involved as well, although I wish that KWin guy (..mgraesslin? sorry, I suck at names) had been able to stay at tokamak longer. :)

We’ve emerged with a new vision of what activities are all about, and I’d like to share that vision so that I don’t get blank stares when I mention how much I wish I had activities already. ;)

See, what we have right now, that we call activities… they’re not what I think of as activities any more. They’re just desktop containments, groups of plasmoids. They can have a name, but nothing makes use of that yet. What I think of as an “activity” is the entirety of what I’m working on at the moment – be it a kde-related project or a university course or just reading lots of comics. :) This activity includes several windows from several applications. It includes files needed for the project. It includes a set of plasmoids, like the one I put my list of math questions on and the calculator plasmoid to go with it. At times it includes only *part* of an application: show me school email folders when I’m doing schoolwork, hide the KDE lists so that I’m less tempted to procrastinate. ;) Some activities have lots of associated windows, and since I can’t carry around a spare monitor with my laptop, I’ll use virtual desktops to have more “space” to lay out my windows for that activity.

When I’m working on one activity, I don’t want to be distracted by other activites. Everything related to the other activities is out of my way, sitting on *those* activities only. If my hardware isn’t up to leaving all my activities running at the same time, or if I just want to pack one away because I won’t be needing it for a while, I can do so, and everything that’s no longer needed will be closed. When I want that activity again I can load it up and return right where I left off.

If I open a document tagged for a certain activity, it’ll be associated with that activity by default; if there’s no obvious association then the new window will be available on all activities until I choose to associate it. Windows can be associated with any number of activities, so I can have anki associated with both of the courses I use it for and still not be bothered by it when I’m hacking on plasma.

Now, that vision is fairly bold. It includes a lot of features that don’t exist at the moment. You will *not* see all these features in KDE 4.4, not by a long shot. However, a lot of the framework already exists. Code was recently committed to Nepomuk to represent activites there; and from there, any program can ask what activity we’re on and update itself to fit. KWin code can be written to hide windows that don’t belong. Plasma will have a new bar (a bit like the new add-widgets bar probably) for managing actvities (not until 4.5 now, I’m afraid). Saving little mini-sessions of windows along with the activity is something I’m going to investigate over christmas (hoping it won’t be too painful :).

There are still details that haven’t been filled in (like, what happens to the activity-per-desktop setting? is it possible to have a mode where activities and virtual desktops act as one?), but we have another tokamak in february, and I’m sure more good ideas will come from that. Once things actually begin to take shape, more of the pieces should fall into place, and in the end we’ll be another step closer to a workspace that enables you to get work done instead of having to be worked around. :)

How We Get There

Here’s a rough roadmap for when I expect these features to show up. It’s not set in stone, of course; we could get an awesome volunteer who goes and does half the work in a few weeks, or we could lose a key person to other commitments and not be able to get it done as fast… but I’m hoping it’ll go somewhat vaguely like this:

4.4
Plasma still has a ZUI, although the only feature not reachable from elsewhere is dragging a widget between activities. Nepomuk advertises which activity the user is on, but no applications are listening yet.

4.5
Windows can be associated with activities; those windows will only show on the activities they’re associated with. Plasma will have an activity manager instead of a ZUI. Saving and loading the plasma side of activities will work, but windows won’t go with them.

4.6
Windows will be saved and restored with the activity. Applications will start offering the ability to show data specific to the current activity. Experiments with automatically associating new windows to the right activity begin.

4.7
???

4.8
Profit! ;)

So, it’s probably going to take a while – but I think it’ll be really cool, and really useful… almost every day now I’m wishing I could organize my stuff by activity instead of having lots of windows all mixed together… even with 6 virtual desktops :P there’s just not enough flexibility in what we have now.

Yep, I’m a too.

Also, :)

Life’s been crazy busy for me as well these days. last time I blogged was the end of devdays, right? well, the day after I got home I had a midterm. still managed to get an above average mark despite having ignored half the material. ;) then there were assignments, and projects, and all sorts of meetings… I also seem to have got myself volunteered for my friend’s school project. they let me borrow an n900 to help out; how could I resist? ;) Then there were the people from devdays aaron mentioned, and I’m trying to do one more redesign of my mouse plugin UI before feature freeze, and there are other plasma things I’m praying I can sneak in under that deadline (let’s not jinx it by saying what they are ;) – and on top of all *that*, I’m starting something at school as well… oh yeah, and my social life finally seems to have returned to the level it was at before I went off to china. :)

Still, there are only two weeks of classes left. soon, soon I will have a break. :) a few weeks of relaxing and bugfixing (I need my plasma fix!), then back to school for what will likely be an even crazier semester. I’ll be taking four courses instead of three, one will be a Writing course (with a capital W!), there’s campkde and tokamak (assuming no conflicts with midterms), and several other things to keep me busy. I need to get back to my german practice, too; I’ve been letting that slide for most of this semester.

I think I’m pushing the limits of how much I can do without burning out. It’s fun. :)

wow. it’s been a long few days. and suddenly they’re over.

devdays was great. :) I arrived on monday for the education track – nokia needs more qt developers, so it wants schools to use qt more. :) there were several discussions about available resources, upcoming resources and how people have been using qt in schools so far. I was surprised to find one of my former teachers here from BCIT – plus jeff’s teacher from SFU, and someone from UBC too. :)

We weren’t even the only Vancouverites here – later on I was introduced to some others, plus someone from Victoria. :) it’s a small world indeed. and of course there were friendly trolls here. :) it’s always nice to see familiar faces and make new friends.

tuesday and wednesday went by in a bit of a blur. the network wasn’t giving out IPs most of the time, so we weren’t online much. There were presentations, there was yummy food, a quiz thing during tuesday’s dinner where gary and alex both won n900’s… wednesday there were more prizes, and alex won *another* one. :)

In one of the presentations today, the Qt4 Dance song was played… I tried to get people singing (*cough*alexis*cough*), but they’re no fun ;P

I met lots of people here; some are interested in using kde stuff on devices, some are *already* using kde stuff, some are looking for interns and/or hiring… some are just generally cool ;)

oh, and Froglogic and ICS are especially cool; thanks to them (and alex) I’m sleeping in a hotel and not on the street. ;)

Tomorrow morning I head back to the airport; back home I have homework and a midterm and people’s birthdays. seems like another world sometimes… a world where I get a lot more sleep ;)

I’m down in San Francisco this week for Qt Developer Days. It actually hasn’t started yet, though; this weekend blauzahl and des organized an informal kde sprint. Gary joined us too, and Knut was kind enough to let us use the Nokia offices. :)

I arrived saturday… afternoon. eventually. :) the flight was delayed due to fog, and delayed again; I’m lucky I didn’t have a connecting flight. There was one bonus; the flight was circling over the fog just long enough for my movie to finish. ;)

Despite the fog trouble at the airport, SF is quite warm and sunny. :) It’s weird, but nice; Vancouver’s been having normal autumn rain so I haven’t seen much sun for a while.

At the nokia offices, Knut gave us a bit of a lecture on how to organize a sprint, and greeneg talked about where KDE needs to improve for enterprise users. Then we had lunch at 4pm (yes. lunch.) and chatted. We came up with a bit of an agenda for sunday. I don’t remember much after that, just that I was on my computer and very *very* tired. :) I do remember that knut’s n900 is very very shiny.

Eventually, rather late, we pulled ourselves away from the laptops and went out for dinner. Me, blauzahl and des wanted to go out for halloween next… but we hadn’t had much luck finding somewhere to *go*… I got dressed up in my costume (but I’d left my homemade mask at home! waah :( I ended up using a cheap dollar-store mask instead) and we drove around looking for a bar… well, we did find one, but by the time that happened it was so late (probably 1am) and we were so very tired… so we changed our minds and headed home. We took the scenic route back, though, and saw plenty of fun costumes. :)

Sunday we went out to the day of the dead festival (sorry, forgot my camera *again*). After lunch we headed to the nokia office. Me and greeneg worked on techbase’s git documentation. There’s only a little new material so far, but there’s a framework sketched out. Feel free to help us fill it in. :)
After that, blauzahl went through some questions about the new activity stuff (I understand what I mean a lot better after trying to explain it to her) and asked us questions about konqueror use.

Now it’s dinnertime again. We don’t get to use the office on monday, so we’ll probably hang out at the hotel then. :)

So… I’m sitting here, thinking. when really I should be sleeping. :) There’s a lot going on in the free software world these days. I’m going to throw out a few wild predictions here about how things will be a year from now. :)

Keep in mind that these are all from my own crazy and sleep-deprived mind. Some will seem obvious, and some will turn out to be completely wrong. For entertainment purposes only, yadda yadda yadda.

First of all, pretty soon kde geeks will complain more about people assuming they have firefox and a google account than windows, IE and office.

Eventually everyone will get a google wave account, play with it, and get bored. Wave & google docs usage will rise steadily, though. That slowly rising tide will worry us, until finally someone says Enough and starts a real movement for Free services & data.

Twitter and facebook are boring now… They’ll still hang around, people will use them, but like icq, eventually most people just won’t care.

Kde will still be using svn. Every few months someone will get fed up and go do one of the tasks needed for git migration. Many developers will have switched to gitsvn for the project they contribute to most – hey, at least they’ll be used to git terminology when we’re finally ready to switch to real git.

Chromium will slowly gain ground as people tire of firefox. Tragic, really; nobody will step forward with a qwebkit-based browser to compete. Konq will still be largely ignored (even though it’s become a good browser again), arora and rekonq will stay toy projects. No marketing, no mindshare, few users. Remeber getfirefox.com? Why aren’t we doing something like that? we (theoretically) support as many websites as chrome because we’re all using webkit (or khtml). all they’ve got on us is speed, the Google brand, and the Google marketing.

…And yet everyone will still have firefox installed, for those websites that just won’t work anywhere else.

Plasma-netbook will make a big splash, and contribute to KDE’s rising visibility.. Many distros will still ignore it, but one will switch its focus to kde, and then another… other areas of KDE will mature, and the benefits of our Pillars of KDE will shine through… In two years we’ll be the default on most distros. Gnome won’t know what hit them ;)

The web movement will grow. Web this, web that, web everything. And we’ll have to put up with it, because it’s going to be a while before the hype wears off and people start to get tired of the web’s disadvantages. Oh, and many people will decide to try and work around those disadvantages instead of trying to bring the web’s advantages to non-web stuff.

Silk will come out, and that’ll help. It’ll make things less stupidly painful… But in a way it’s just treating a symptom. And websites change, so stuff will break. Of course i’m sure silk will include ghns updates for stuff that’s likely to get broken… and it *will* be cool and awesome… But it’s still treating a symptom.

The upside of silk’s approach, though, is the short-term gain. Kde-workspace will become the webby desktop, the shiny cool convenient thing that’s better than living in firefox. :) And while that’s gaining us users and making people happy and helping our developers learn about what does and doesn’t work, maybe we can try and come up with something better than the web. something with the advantages of both desktop and internet without the pain of being built on top of infrastructure originally designed for serving & displaying static html pages.

Then again, maybe it’ll be like IPv6 and the new less-painful way won’t be persuasive enough to dislodge the existing stuff. *shrug* :) but I like to think that eventually we’ll retire this old web thing and build something new and clean. I just hope to god that whatever comes after web-3.0 is built with Freedom in mind before profit. We all depend on services like email or facebook to a scary degree these days… if google were to shut down my gmail account due to some misunderstanding, it would cause huge problems, and there would be no appeal. heck, KDE e.V had problems not long ago with their paypal account, iirc. These online services are their own judge and jury right now, and the more we depend on them, the more scary that gets.

Oh, and then swine flu will mutate and kill us all! …no :P people will have practicaly forgotten about it in a year. remember SARS?

someone will start going around to different applications, porting each one to use nepomuk where appropriate, so that its usage grows… but users still won’t know it’s there unless strigi tries to eat their computer (which will, of course, be blamed on nepomuk. or plasma. everything is plasma). :)

Anyways…
I seen to be too tired to follow a train of thought any more. :) Again, all of these predictions are just meant for entertainment. don’t take it too seriously. and don’t quote me. ;)

So what have I been up to lately? Mostly school.

My stats and AI courses are easy, but still take up time (I’m trying to actually do homework and study instead of just cramming ;)

The robocup project is… Well, it’s a group project. :) It’s not going too badly, though.

I’ve also got martial arts and choir in the evenings (although I think I’m going to drop choir, the schedule’s just a bit too inconvenient). And I found a go club at sfu, which always seems to end in late-night gaming… :) One of the really nice things about school is that every semester there’s a chance of making new friends. Although it is a bit odd to hang out with teenagers – I feel old now ;P

Life is fun and busy… so very busy…

I’ve still been sneaking in a bit of plasma time here and there, though- little fixes for my gsoc project n’stuff. Popup applets can be right-clicked properly. You can add & remove activites without zooming out, too.
Now with those buttons and my activity-list mouse plugin, activities are a lot more convenient:

but that’s a bit ugly. We have better plans being worked on… they are shiny… ;)

Oh, and virtual desktop are more convenient too – you can add a desktop just by right-clicking the pager now. There’ll probably be a remove button soon, but… well.. virtual desktops weren’t really designed for convenience, so it’ll probably have to be a “remove last” button.

Oops, I almost forgot. I can finally commit a bugfix I wrote at tokamak that uses a 4.6 function. whee!

Oh, and i’ll be at dev days in SF. Yay! :) That’ll be fun. And I have midterms directly before and after… Yes, i’m crazy ;)

Well, saturday night was fun. :) We all went out to a chinese restaurant and had lots of yummy food. Then some of us went back to the hotel and played cards for a while. I learnt a new game, but I have no idea how to spell it. :)

Sunday was the last day – checked out of the hotel, did a little hacking, and we had a post-mortem meeting with all the students. I got lost in my laptop after that, plus my mind was not liking the lack of sleep, so I never got around to having lunch… oops. :) There was pizza at the airport, at least. Our group divided up again, into two groups – for the rest of the semester we’ll be working on different features for the robocup client, competing to see which improvements are more helpful, then merging them into trunk (oh god I wish we were using git now instead of svn).

four of us were on the same flight back to vancouver, so we got seats all in a row, which was nice. :) mostly we just wanted sleep, though. god it was nice to get home and sleep in… I didn’t go to any classes today, I need to recover. :)

it’s day two of the ucosp sprint. thursday night I arrived in toronto, tired and coughing… and found karaoke in the hotel bar. grrrr… I *finally* find karaoke, and it’s on a night when I can barely speak. but I met up with some of the other students, and we headed to another bar where the law students were having a party. :) much beer was consumed… and when I wandered back to the hotel with a couple of other students we found the karaoke still going. so we went in there and got to sing the last song. :) I feel sorry for the few people still there listening ;)

friday morning I somehow dragged myself out of bed on time, met the rest of the students, and we headed to the university. there I finally got to meet my team in person. yay! :) we’re doing the robocup 2d simulation… there are a few clients from hte summer that we have the code for, and we had to pick one of them to build on. so we spent time reading stuff and trying to get stuff running, and debated the pros and cons of java vs. python. eventually we decided to extend one of the python clients; it’s got most of the boring details done, but the players are still pretty stupid so there’s lots for us to do. the java project was already so good we weren’t quite sure how we could improve it (and had run out of time to look for things, really).

once we’d settled on a codebase we started poking at that code specifically, trying to get it running on all our computers, coming up with things to improve, fighting with strange network errors… I spent a good chunk of my afternoon replacing the pile of simple bash scripts that started teams with a single more intelligent bash script.

friday evening some student union had organized a party for us at a nearby pub :) free beer FTW. I left early to get caught up on sleep but somehow the interwebs distracted me instead. ;)

saturday morning.. urgh. well, it’s a code sprint, I don’t expect much sleep. the cough and cold are annoying, though. I wandered in late, which turned out to be not so great as my team had started their meeting. oops. :) we came out of that with a list of seven tasks we’re going to do over the semester (and get marked on). I spent most of the rest of the day working with iona on getting the debug output of the clients in a more useful format (one curses thingy per process doesn’t work so well when you start 6+ processes out of a script; we’ve got a PyQt ui started instead).

this afternoon we also had a talk from greg about grad school. I’m not hugely interested, but it was an informative talk. :) most of what I remember is his little speech at the end… undergrad is about learning to learn, grad school is about learning what questions to ask, but what university is really about is teaching us to take over the world. :)

now it’s dinnertime, and I should head out to the group dinner.

wow, the week just flew by. it’s saturday night now, and I’m in zurich, checking email n’stuff. early tomorrow morning I’ll head to the airport.

it’s been a really awesome week. lots of hacking and hiking and very little sleep. it was wonderful to see the plasma family again. I miss you guys already. but I feel like I want a vacation to recover :P

no vacations for me, though. school starts tuesday and I’ve already got reading assigned. I’m in this cool new course where we’re going to be working on projects with students from other universities… here’s the blog for the course. it should be a lot of fun. :) but… the downside is it might be very busy, too, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll have for KDE this semester. we’ll see. after everything that’s happened at tokamak I really want to make *some* time to keep hacking. :)

time for more javascript! yay.

First, a quick little thing: my last javascript post was slides from my LFNW presentation, which had an extra little thing about dataengines. I never did blog about that code, though.
It’s pretty simple. I wanted the time engine to give me an update once a day, so that I can reset the flag. For demonstration purposes, though, once a day isn’t so great, so I set it to reset every ten seconds instead.


plasmoid.dataUpdate = function(source,data)
{
progress.setIcon("flag-red");
progressValue = 0;
}
engine = dataEngine("time");
engine.connectSource("Local", plasmoid, 10*1000);


I define my dataUpdate function, which gets the source and data – but doesn’t actually use them. It just resets the flag back to red (maybe later I should set it to double-check the date, in case there’s a forced update). then I grab the time engine, and connect the local time to my plasmoid with an update of ten seconds.

now for something a bit harder: I want more than one task.

So, first attempt. I put the task creation into a function, and calling this function made things work just the same as before. So far so good. Next, I changed all references to the label, icon and progress counter into arrays. New tasks are appended to the end of each array, and the dataUpdate clears them all. the config UI only controls the name of the first task for now; a second one is hardcoded in there.

Then I realised that the slot for changing the flag could only work for one icon. huh. :/ maybe it would be possible to add the function to each icon? but it’d still not know its index in progressValues. what I really want here is for the label, icon and counter to be wrapped up in their own little class. and if that class was a widget with its own layout, then I could easily stack them vertically instead of having everything all in one row.

I haven’t a clue how to do classes in js though. inheriting graphicswidget, creating slots…
well, I read up on javascript prototypes, and found out about the extends keyword… but I bet we don’t have QGraphicsWidget in the js bindings. :P ok, for now I’ll skip the inheritance.

I spent a long time trying to understand how to do classes in javascript. It’s weird. It hurt my brain (probably didn’t help that I was half asleep the whole time). I did get it working eventually, though. and then discovered that connecting signals and slots in javascript didn’t work quite as I thought it did. if you want to connect to a function that’s in your class, you have to use either foo.mySignal.connect(this, this.mySlot) or foo.mySignal.connect(this, “mySlot”) – with these it refers to the function in the class (not a global function) with “this” properly set.

Here’s the code using classes – I ended up reorganizing the code a bit in the process. There’s the Task class constructor, which sets up all the variables (label, icon and progress counter) and layouting and connections. Then there’s the reset function, which is called on timeout, and the moreProgress function, called when the icon is clicked. After that I have some setup code that creates two Tasks, and the old dataengine and config stuff. Only the name of the first Task is configurable, still (and I’m being bad and setting it directly instead of putting a function in the class for that).

So now what? Well, the layouting is ugly. Let’s see if we can improve it a bit. Wow, I managed to crash plasmoidviewer. It doesn’t like me doing new LinearLayout(plasmoid) more than once – riight, because the plasmoid itself can only have one controlling layout. I want new LinearLayout(layout) to have layouts inside layouts. Fixed that, and now I have nested layouts. :)

Notice that the flags aren’t aligned with each other. that’s what happens when you put hboxes in a vbox instead of using a gridlayout. I could hide it by putting the icon on the left, but really I should do it properly…
uhm. looks like we don’t have gridlayout bindings ATM. we do seem to have qgraphicsitem bindings… but I don’t want *those* any more, because with a gridlayout there’d be no point.

Oh well – I think that’s enough for now. I’m going to go work on something else… or see when lunch is… :)