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Armitage: The Future of Activities
KDE hacker Chani Armitage writes about KDE "activities" on her blog. Activities are part of a move towards a context-dependent desktop. Both Sugar's Activities and GNOME 3.0 workspaces have a similar focus, as we looked at back in May. "Theyre 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 Im less tempted to procrastinate. ;)"
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Armitage: The Future of Activities Posted Nov 30, 2009 22:04 UTC (Mon) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]
Intriguing. So, would this require a sort of metadata tagging of the files, applications, and other pieces of data involved? I wonder how that would be managed, and how you'd develop application support for it?
Armitage: The Future of Activities Posted Nov 30, 2009 22:07 UTC (Mon) by sebas (subscriber, #51660) [Link]
Nepomuk, the semantic store will provide these features.
Armitage: The Future of Activities Posted Nov 30, 2009 22:21 UTC (Mon) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]
Oh, that thing. Y'know, I read the Wikipedia description and the "Project Summary" at the Nepomuk website, and came away from both with absolutely no more knowledge than when I arrived. The descriptions were practically content-free.
It's encouraging to hear that there's a "there" there.
Armitage: The Future of Activities Posted Dec 1, 2009 2:22 UTC (Tue) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]
Quite a bit of the work in Nepomuk is defining the various data types and
formats that would be used to pass specific data around. There is also a storage backend.
It is more of an api than an application, and will be as useful as the
Derek
Armitage: The Future of Activities Posted Dec 1, 2009 7:04 UTC (Tue) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]
Well, Chani Armitage's description of how "activities" would work was what helped me actually understand what Nepomuk was trying to do.
Armitage: The Future of Activities Posted Dec 1, 2009 17:22 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
Of course the descriptions are content-free. It's a metadata description system. Content is outside the scope of the project.
Seriously, nobody's ever managed to come up with a way to say anything descriptive about any system filling this sort of role. It's something where someone working on an application that produces or consumes that sort of information might have some idea how they want to interact with it, and it's otherwise too abstract to say anything specific at all.
Armitage: The Future of Activities Posted Dec 1, 2009 19:42 UTC (Tue) by sebas (subscriber, #51660) [Link]
Can you be a bit more specific? ;-)
No kidding, we'll publish an article on dot.kde.org later this week that
And yes, the implementation of the whole workspaces / virtual desktops /
Armitage: The Future of Activities Posted Dec 2, 2009 7:02 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] The great Jorge Luis Borges wrote about one such metadata system in 1942, and what became of it:These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.Isn't it great, tagging all animals around you?
Armitage: The Future of Activities Posted Dec 4, 2009 0:29 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] The last two entries have become corrupted (ironic, for work from the author of The Library of Babel), perhaps a difference in translators? The entries I'm used to read:
(m) those that have just broken a flower vase; (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.which definitely reads better in English.
A rather narrow category Posted Dec 4, 2009 19:16 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Funnily enough, I was ready to agree with you; but I looked it up and in the original it says:que acaban de romper el jarrónwhich would translate to "those that have just broken the flower vase".
Armitage: The Future of Activities Posted Dec 3, 2009 7:55 UTC (Thu) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
IIUC, it's just a database, with rich metadata, that many apps share access to.
I am not sure why they feel compelled to bury this in buzzwords.
Could be useful, if it all worked Posted Nov 30, 2009 22:43 UTC (Mon) by markc (guest, #4419) [Link]
I just installed Kubuntu 9.10 for my sister and the plasma desktop
experience is close to a disaster for novice users. In principle, Nepomuk and the other foundational pillars of KDE, are good technological ideas if they worked well enough for the upper level applications to use but at this point in time, nearly 2 years after 4 dot oh, they are not. Perhaps I should "blame" Canonical instead of KDE, perhaps I should use something else so I don't need to "blame" the no doubt hard working KDE and Kubuntu devs. Perhaps the latest trunk build in the hands of experienced developers, that know what to use and avoid in plasma, works for them but if anyone puts a recent and fresh install of KDE in front of a novice computer user will absolutely witness a computing experience disaster unfold.
If a KDE 3.6 existed, built on top of the Qt4 libs, then there is no way I
Could be useful, if it all worked Posted Dec 1, 2009 14:21 UTC (Tue) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link] You don't need to use activities, you know. Plasma can present a perfectly useful, usable and equivalent nineties desktop experience, just like KDE 3.x -- that's the way I use it myself, and the way most distributions seem to package it out of the box.
Could be useful, if it all worked Posted Dec 2, 2009 11:29 UTC (Wed) by buchanmilne (subscriber, #42315) [Link] I just installed Kubuntu 9.10 for my sister and the plasma desktop experience is close to a disaster for novice users. My wife hardly noticed the difference between KDE3 and KDE4, but she didn't really see KDE 4.1 or much of 4.3. Maybe you should at least boot a different distro's Live CD/USB image. For example, Mandriva 2010.0 (but please don't mess the image up by using unetbootin, it already supports booting from USB, using unetbootin will break it).
Armitage: The Future of Activities Posted Dec 1, 2009 5:18 UTC (Tue) by microchip (guest, #41021) [Link]
markc, you first mistake was installing Kubuntu. It's gotta be one of the worst KDE distro's around.
Armitage: The Future of Activities Posted Dec 1, 2009 19:50 UTC (Tue) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]
Unless I am missing something (totally possible) this seems like something that could be done on either:
1. Virtual desktops (minus the closing unused apps part) 2. By having multiple desktop login profiles. For example. "Dennis (School)", "Dennis (Astronomy)", and Dennis (Design)".
The part missing for #2 above (or is it?), is the ability to shut down a desktop environment and have it resume as left, with the app status as it was.
I see the appeal of activities, but it seems like something best done via a login profile, or an optimized virtual desktop mode that suspends and resumes apps as needed. It would be cool to be able to go down to a virtual desktop and right-click then select "Suspend" for that environment and/or be able to save and open a given virtual desktop.
Armitage: The Future of Activities Posted Dec 3, 2009 18:13 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
I guess you can get at least part of these benefits by using a mashup of
other techologies and concepts - it's just harder ;-)
Basically, there are 3 things to Activities in KDE:
The first is there, the second almost done, the third is not even started
Your proposals would lead to a similar result - but still require the apps
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