Welcome to the family [Activities, Apps, SLC]

Functional Programming in C++

Published by Ivan Čukić in the KDE development: Activities section, on 15 October 2012

You say you want a revolution Well, you know We all want to change the world You tell me that it’s evolution Well, you know We all want to change the world ~ The Beatles (John Lennon)

I don’t know whether it is revolution, or evolution, but my favourite ideas that the Plasma team thought of a long time ago are finally getting to the users.

It is quite nice to see the positive experiences with the activities system in Plasma 4.9 all around the web. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. There are a few nice things coming to the following release.

The top feature for me is going to be the Share-Like-Connect applet, and the document scoring based on the usage. Lately, I’ve been on a patching spree to increase the number of applications that support activities and the number has increased substantially. Currently, these are the supported applications:

Dolphin
Gwenview
Kate and KWrite
Okular
Words, Stage and the rest of the Calligra family (except for Kexi which will be patched soon)
GVim

I plan to add a few applications to this list before the hard feature freeze slaps me in the face.

Thankfully, I’m not alone in this endeavour. (Edit: added the link for the following text) Tomaz Canabrava’s army of students are going through KDE’s extragear and doing the same thing I’m doing in integral parts of KDE SC. This really offloads a lot of work off my shoulders so big kudos to them!

Mark
That is really cool that activities evolve. It would be interesting to know what it exactly means if an application supports activities. Could you give some examples. Are there any plans supporting kontact-applications? There I could really make use of it. I just imagine to show certain folders/favourites/accounts in kmail depending on the activity context.
Ivan Čukić
@<a href="#comment-32409" rel="nofollow">Mark</a>: Things like those are a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.
Application developers are waiting to do fancy things like those until activities become more useful, while in order for them to become that, the applications need to have a higher level of integration.
Those ideas for Kontact (and similar for KDE Telepathy) are one of the planned things, but don't expect them in 4.10.
So far, only the minimum integration level is reached. Applications are reporting which window contains a document, which document (document == anything with an URI), whether the document has the focus and similar. This is the main thing that I need for my further work in the kactivities and plasma.
Namely, it allows some nice things like SLC applet (which will début in 4.10) to work. It allows the so called jump-lists to be developed with documents sorted by scores, and not just simple 'recently accessed', etc.
This kind of info can be used in various places. My main task so far was to work on the backend, but it was mostly useless since it had no exposure to the user.
redsteakraw
What is the difference between this and the ability to save the application's states when an activity is stopped. Is that a different API, because that would be awesome if more apps saved their stated and activities could reliably act as desktop session management and document organization.
The only problem is that activity switching is still a bit slow and is mostly hidden from the average user. I like the plasma active approach, I wish that would be ported and tweaked to the desktop(IE use the mouse scroll wheel to scroll through activities and show more activities since desktops usually have larger and higher resolution screens. Also a quick way of launching it could be through screen edges, if I just move my mouse all the way over to the right and it pops up that would be super convenient.
One important feature I would also want is to only allow certain activities to load if the computer is connected through a VPN or to auto connect to the VPN then load the activity. This would be useful for a Ktorrent activity or a secure ftp activity.
Stan aka 'Xeno'
Actually it would be great to have activies-aware zeitgeist, with apps and plasma itself storing usage stats with it. Then all this informations, like recent docs/apss opened, most oftes used docs/apss , could be sorted by activity and used in places like launchers, last documents lists in aplications, history in webbrowsers and such. It would make timeline presenting apss (like one in ROSA launcher) much more complete. Right now plasma potential is kinda wasted when each app is doing things on its own (ie various launchers are unaware of apps launched by other means, apps not sharing information about accessed docs etc... Another thing is are application-specific filters. ;)
Ivan Čukić
@<a href="#comment-32504" rel="nofollow">Stan aka ‘Xeno’</a>: Everything is collected in one place just like with Zeitgeist.
It can be used by any application, including the launchers.
There were plans to interconnect Z and KAMD (which I'm still in favour of) but Zeitgeist lacks one important feature for plasma - the ability to tell which document is in which window, and whether it has focus or not. It just knows whether a document *is* open.
On the other hand, Zeitgeist collects some more data that we are not interested in. (though, there *was* support for that in KActivities API back in the day I thought that the integration will happen)
rekonq: October news! | adjam.weblog()
[...] Rekonq 1.3 stable release with some bugfixes over 1.2 + a nice patch from Ivan Cukic, allowing activities support for rekonq, too! It will be applied to rekonq2 as last feature to be included [...]
dominik.baumann
Great!!
So, if i understand you right, the following bug is already or will be fixed soon?:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=284474
db