Foreword

Since we lost the King Nepomuk at the battle on the now red desktop fields near the Semantic River, the common people lost the ability to tie things to their activities.

Nepomuk Battle
Nepomuk Battle

Stories and hymns of how King Nepomuk got to the throne by learning the sacred skill of tying things to one another with differently coloured strings and with labels attached to them, will remain in our heads and hearts for years to come.

The most famous and loved will always be the balad of the Active lands of Plasma where the society became so enlightened they managed to expel the Royal Society for Putting Things on top of other things.

What the future (KF5) brings?

Ok, stopping with the story now.

KActvities are back in the world of semantic linking, this time without Nepomuk, and without any unnecessary performance overhead. The new service implements all the features Nepomuk provided for activities, but also goes a bit further than that.

Everything is exposed to the developers via the ResourceModel available via the org.kde.kactivities QML import.

With the new system, we are finally able to implement one of the most requested features - to be able to define some Kickoff/Homerun/Lancelot/whatever favourites to be tied to a specific activity while leaving some to be global as they are now.

A small task for a volunteer

If someone is willing to port the Dolphin plugin and the Activities KIO to the new system (for KDE SC 4.13), please send me an e-mail.

Namely, the new activities service (although based on Qt5/KF5) can and should serve as a drop-in replacement in the future 4.x releases (if the distributions decide to ship it, I’m not going to force the issue).

In order to restore the missing features that depended on nepomuk, the two components from above need to be implemented to work with the new service.

My current focus is on KF5 and Plasma Next, and I’m not going to be able to implement those any time soon.

So, if you think you’re up to the task, and would like to be able again to link stuff to activities in 4.x, ping me.