On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 2:22 AM, Aaron J. Seigo <ase...@kde.org> wrote: > hi... > > back when we started the path towards plasma i said that we needed to slowly > evolve the desktop beyond the desktop folder with icons littered on the > desktop. > > now we have activities, kick-ass containments like search and launch and > grouping desktop.
the biggest thing that have to be worked on, is making applications activity aware, it's the only way to convince people that activities are -not- virtual desktops ;) > it is time to go to that next step and move people away from the old ways. yep, I would still like to push desktop beyond the desktop, resistence against is so amazing that i find it harder and harder. we need a concentrated effort between all areas for this i think, not just plasma ;) > i was at a friend's house last night where a bunch of people gathered to hang > out, chat, play games, etc. there was a desktop system there running plasma > desktop with the search and launch containment and a gorgeous translucent > panel couresty of kwin. i do think s&l looks great in the dashboard, however i have some issues of it being in the desktop, will explain later ;) > let's try something big and new. let's make that Big Move and step away from > ~/Desktop. to me the biggest dumb thing is ~/Desktop itself, not much having icons on desktop (in the form of folderview applets) having n folderviews topic-specific goes very well with the concept of activities. the biggest hurdle is always the fact of having them in a background-ish desktop. > my proposal is this: > > * by default, Search and Launch on the desktop There are several issues with s&l: * it's not really done for big screens, there is a sad line of icons sitting in the middle of the desktop * it's not really done for containing applets, would almost mean dropping desktop widgets: - right now it contains widgets in a little panel like strip with horizontal form factor. now overly pretty. - making it contain free layout applets like the desktop would look quite dirty since applets would cover the launcher icons randomly * being always mostly covered by windows limits the usefulness, as i said great in dashboard (this is quite true for widgets as well, but being smaller the problem is less strong) * it empasizes the concept of starting apps, (or "start menu" if you want) a lot, that's really something i would like to get away with what about having it (or something similar) that appears as a big sidebar of the screen when clicking on the K icon? > * an icon in this S&L that takes you to your desktop folder .. in a file > manager. could be, i would still rather find a way to encoourage use of folderview as activity relevant file containers tough > * a new panel layout (TBD: let's work on this together!) a long due thing is moving app systray items in the taskbar and even hiding all xembed icons by default (but, a voluntary is needed to have this done) > * improve the tasks widget to have some of the nice features of widgets like > "smooth tasks" with the mouse over highlights yeah, either the tooltip has to be improved a lot or the tasks widget using its own, like the widgets explorer > * an "activities" widget (i'll hapilly write it) that sits next to the app > launcher and when clicked brings up the actvities manager there is one on kde-look. however i remeber that you had a valid argument against it: it would slowly become basically a replica of the activity manager with most-but-not-all of its features. > * an activities switcher as a kwin effect (!) there is always the problem it would lie a bit if applications become aware of activities > * have all activities avaiable in kactivitmanagerd, even if they are "stopped" > in plasma-desktop +1 > toughts? I think what this reflect, but still not really addresses is the limit of usefulness of the desktop window as is managed nowdays. both widgets or the s&l have a quite limited usage if they are in background, so wanting to change what's inside it seems more a way to go around it (that's one of the reasons in netbook and mobile the desktop is not a desktop window, but it wouldn't work in plasma-desktop)... also the dashboard is nice, but it's a modal thing, that makes you be either in "plasma mode" or not. i don't have an answer for this, but i feel that should be found a way with a slightly different window management to * emphasize the dashboard usage * have some way to make it not so modal (making clicks pass in empty areas with a window mask? an half-screen dashboard?) Cheers, Marco Martin _______________________________________________ Plasma-devel mailing list Plasma-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
