Activities and the move to context-oriented desktops [LWN.net]

Activities and the move to context-oriented desktops

Posted May 28, 2009 3:50 UTC (Thu) by lothar (subscriber, #14052)
Parent article: Activities and the move to context-oriented desktops

I love the context oriented work that one get with Mylyn in Eclipse. It's great if one
switches between programming tasks. I can envision a similar powerful use for the
Desktop. Tasktop (the commercial part of Mylyn) already shows what's possible by
integrating email and web browsing into a task focused environment.
But in order to do the focus/filtering that Mylyn provides and that makes it so powerful, the
desktop environments need to define APIs, so that they are interoperable.

(Log in to post comments)

Activities and the move to context-oriented desktops

Posted May 28, 2009 5:25 UTC (Thu) by pkt (guest, #53879) [Link]

Indeed, I think something mylyn-like could be very beneficial to KDE (I don't know about GNOME since I don't use it). KDE already has the mentioned "Activities" concept, Nepomuk, geo-location etc and most importantly it has KDE-style APIs for a great variety of things, like hardware (solid).

On the other hand, a way to automatically and dynamically build a "context" by just looking at what the user is doing right now is currently missing and mylyn (to the extent that I understand it) is mainly about that.

E.g., imagine the system "remembering" that when you are in your "graphics design" activity, you are very likely to be using gimp, inkscape etc, so it preloads parts of them in RAM to make them really fast to start.