On Tuesday 03 February 2009 05:37:21 Bob S wrote:
This is really confusing to an old senile duffer like me. Pray tell....What is an "activity"? What does one do to create an "activity"? How does one change "activities"? Is it just another name for the virtual desktops that we had in 3.5? Where does one dind a how-to or whatever to learn this stuff? I have read just about every 4.2 tutelage that has been published.
While Boyd's earlier answer in this thread is technically correct, it's not the simplest one. For some reason the term 'Activity' is overloaded in current KDE 4. As well as the "Zooming UI" activities he describes, you can change the "Desktop Activity" that defines whether you have icons or a clean slate for whatever widgets you want on your desktop. To get to that, right click the desktop, Desktop Settings, look at Desktop Activity and change that to 'Folder View'. I think it should have been called 'Icons On Desktop' but that's just me. My 2 pence on the ZUI is that it's a fantastic research project but nowhere near ready for production use. That's why we (openSUSE) default you to the Plain Desktop in 11.1, which lacks the controls to mess around with the ZUI. ZUI is to desktop widgets what virtual desktops are to the set of visible windows. The zooming is a cute way to switch and keep that 50000' view of your virtual life beloved of GTD acolytes. For it to be usable it needs to have a coherent idea how to work with virtual desktops and viewports - being able to switch both independently is not it. It also needs integration with session management, keyboard shortcuts, and notification policies, just OTOMH. Anyone telling you it's a productivity booster right now is a Plasma developer, or else indistinguishable from one in a lineup. The current implementation adds complexity.
In 3.5 I had a diffferent wallpaper, color, or whatever to distinguish between the desktops so I could easily tell what desktop I was on.and run different apps in each allowing me to change to them quickly. That is what really stops me from using 4.2.
You can do this but it missed string freeze so there is no UI for it. You can enable it but it involves hacking config files. Ask me if you really want to know how to do it.
Are you saying I could have a Konqueror activity, a Kmail activity, a Gimp activity, etc, etc.?
You could do that, although my understanding is that you would define different Activities based on a real world activity. We do this with windows and virtual desktops already though. I guess a useful combination of the two would be to use this extra level of customisation to make a virtual desktop even more task specific. I got a new camera recently, and discovered that despite having more options than early versions of KDE (and about 10000 more than the 60s Spotmatic it replaces) the buttons and controls are placed so as to make it a great tool for its task. A computer desktop is a universal tool, so is there scope to make it fit given tasks better. When I'm coding something difficult, I have to cut out any extraneous distractions to get it done in finite time. I could imagine a Dev activity, having no taskbar, no system tray or notifications, just a fullscreen Vim or KDevelop and a clock. On an Inbox activity I would have a task list panel fixed on one side of the screen permanently showing my overall RememberTheMilk tasks, and my mail inbox filling the rest of the screen. No escape from handling all the incoming mail. Project-specific activities could show relevant files and folders, involved persons and just whatever apps are needed as icons on the desktop. In Chani Armitage's blog today she links screenshots of her "Main activity" and a "School activity" (http://chani.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/on-the-road- again/). Note that the Folder View widget on the School activity shows a different folder to the Main activity. NB Chani _is_ a Plasma dev. Hope that's enlightening Will -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org