It’s screencast time again! :)
For this one, I focused on how I, personally, use activities. I got the impression that showing real-world usage might make it a bit clearer what I’m trying to do here. :)
You can probably hear me getting a bit tired at the end… I had to reboot twice and fix my damn volume control before finally getting that one, so yes, I *am* tired. :P
oh, and here’s the activity manager plasmoid I mentioned. :)
ChaniBlog 
Really great stuff, I can’t wait to use more activites in 4.6.
http://blip.tv/file/get/Chani-activities46160.ogv is the download link for those who are searching for it.
right, I keep forgetting to include a link to blip.tv…
btw, I just renamed the “misc” activity to “reading”. :) since that’s what it ended up being: reading material.
…of course, now I bet I’ll find something that doesn’t count as reading material *and* doesn’t belong anywhere else. ah well, I’ll deal with that when it comes. :)
It does look really good, And I’m sure they are already useful for a lot of people, but at the same time I can’t imagine myself using it.
It seems there is a lot of work to set them and maintain them in order, and at least in my case not sure if worth the effort, are activities oriented to more multi-tasking users?, or It just needs some practicing to take advantage of them.
Some things I think are a bit hard are:
-Moving an app between activities, maybe it could be implemented that when you move a window into the activity bar entry, it moves into that activity?
-Changing between activities when starting a new task was something that I was worried about, but it seems comfortable enough with the activity bar on top, maybe it should be default when having more than 2 activities?
With these changes, or something equivalent, I can imagine myself sitting on the computer and suddenly saying “I will do that work think” move the mouse up and click work, or opening a work related file from the browser in my “fun” activity, and just throwing it in work activity bar on top.
Sorry if this seems a bit ranty, I can write code right now (Im learning) but at least I’d like to give some ideas.
well, it only takes as much work as you care to put in, really. you can have a few vague groupings, or you can micro-manage all your windows, it’s up to you. :)
moving windows to another activity is annoyingly hard, yes. something must be done. probably drag&drop support. is anyone interested in implementing that for the activitybar?
as for defaults… it probably won’t be. but aaron was talking about putting something in the panel, maybe. … hmmmmm, and I bet I could write a panel template that sets it up with the right plasmoid and settings! :)
Very nice screencast. And amazing functionality. I have quite a good grasp of what I will do with activities. Can’t wait to switch to 4.6 full time.
In my opinion, one of the most interesting use case of activity is the switching between plasma-desktop and plasma-media-center.
KDE developpers should focus on this use case.
Some idea of improvements:
– per activity panels (plasma-media-center doesn’t need a task bar).
– an improved activity manager: it should look like grouped task items.
– automatically stop an activity: people don’t want manually manage cpu or memory usage.
per-activity panels are doable, someone just needs to step up and work on it. :)
anyone can write their own activity manager – like the one in the screencast. the built-in one will see improvements, but I doubt there’ll be grouping any time soon.
automatic stopping was discussed – particularly for plasma-netbook – but first we have to see how reliable restarting them is. some applications haven’t got proper session support, and it would suck to automatically stop those…
I’m glad to see that per-activity panels is technically doable (and I hope that someone will implement it one day !).
Beside notes, I don’t really use widgets on the desktop but I am really addict to panels :-)
Thank you for your work Chani, I think this will be very useful for me at work where I often must quickly switch between different tasks
The panel functions should not just be per-activity but as well per-virtual desktop.
So we could finally tweak every virtual desktop as we want. Yes, virtual desktop are the big reason why I believe most people will not find activities so usefull. But there are many cases why every virtual desktops should have own panel setups without activities interrupting.
This stuff is so advanced, I can be used for evil purposes!
It reminded me of a pc-game I used to play. The apache helicopter’s control screen had a similar activity-oriented approach: You could adjust them to fit different terrain or targets, and change between them as needed in every phase of the mission.
Cool!
Great screencast!
I really love the way KDE 4 is coming along.
By what time do you think will kde programs be activity aware, with KDE 4.7?
oh and i liked your enlish to german(i am from germany) , do you learn german in school? ;)
:) yes, we’ll have the first ones in 4.7. rrix has been hacking on konversation (it has kde3support stuff in it still! meep!) and I have a filedialog/dolphin Places patch from my friend that one of us really ought to finish off…
“and I have a filedialog/dolphin Places patch from my friend that one of us really ought to finish off…”
Heh, yeah, I’m just waiting for KActivityConsumer & Friends to be moved out of kdebase/workspace, and then I’ll probably finish it up.
as for german, no, I haven’t taking any courses. I’m learning by watching lots of german-dubbed tv, reading books, and being in berlin. :) Ich weiss nicht, ob mein Deutsch ist sehr gut, weil ich nur lesen und hören, nicht oft sprechen und fast niemals schreiben. :)
lol welche deutschen Serien guckst du?
lol what german shows are you watching?
your german aint to bad, the word order is a little off though, it should have been :
Ich weiß nicht ob mein Deutsch sehr gut ist, weil ich nur lese und höre, nicht oft spreche und fast niemals schreibe.
Voyager. :) we have the whole series. Before that, we watched DS9.
Hi! Although this has still space for improvement, it looks very interesting =). I’m now configuring Activities in KDE 4.5 to try the idea. One question arises: is there a way to configure newly opened applications to be shown in the current active activity only? This would be really useful because, if not, when i’m using an activity and open a new app, the other activities get ‘spammed’ with this new unreleated window. Is this available in 4.6?
Thanks!
yes, that’s the default in 4.6. :)
“I had to reboot twice and fix my damn volume control before finally getting that one, so yes, I *am* tired. :P”
It is a shame that such problems still exist in Linux/BSD OS, when they don’t exist so often in other big operation systems.
yes, who *ever* heard of having to reboot something like windows…
wow, I’ve never seen such a blatant troll on my blog!
*poke*
do you think trolls go well with BBQ sauce?
At least they admitted that Linux is now a big operation [sic] system. Hehe.
After starting using activities I have a question. What happens when a window in a “background” (not the current one) activity needs attention? Does the user get any hint or Plasma just switches to that activity?
it ought to show up in the taskbar and do the needs-attention animation there.
I don’t remember actually testing that though (what apps use it?) so it’d be nice if someone can doublecheck that it does what it should. :)
Ok, I tested it with Kopete (yes, I could have just tried it instead of writing a comment but…) and it works. It even works when the conversation is open through a plasma notification. So, good work!
The only “complaint” I have is that the user may not be aware that he has switched activities if it’s too similar to the current one. Anyway, it works.
And in a totally unrelated and perhaps better suited for Bugzilla comment… There is a global keyboard shortcut to open the activity selector in Plasma. What do you think about making it a toggle? In my opinion it would be nice if you could open AND close the selector using just the keyboard.
Thanks!
yeah, some sort of actiivity transition would be nice. also nice would be the activitymanager plasmoid using the icon of the current activity. :)
as for toggle… I could’ve sworn it *was* a toggle a few months ago.. either I’m crazy or someone changed it. I’d love a patch to change it back.
Wow, a gal who codes for Linux and likes Star Trek. You’re a rare gift, you know that? ;-)
@frank We have Chani. That proves that KDE is better than everything else. :-)
(Just kidding and with all due respect to Chani).