Re: Tagging Workspaces

[William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com>]

Hi,

Sorry for the slow response.

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 10:01 AM, Gianluca Inverso <zappete gmail com> wrote:
> Hi all.
> I'd like to propose my two cents about how to specify "activities" and
> relate them to workspaces in an flexible but still effective way. I hope
> you'll find this interesting, but I won't feel offended if you decide to
> ignore me :)
>
> An already proposed idea was to allow users to specify custom names to
> workspaces. I'd like to expand this idea and connect workspace names to
> Zeitgeist/Tracker(*) tags (like Music, Family, etc.):
>
> * In the recently proposed "one-workspace-at-a-time" style for the overview,
> also show the workspace name (in general, it will be "Workspace X" with X a
> number, or something similar). Allow the user to edit it and:
>
> * When the user edits the workspace name, suggest him the common / most used
> tags in Zeitgeist/Tracker: Music, Family, Work, Photos and so on. We're
> actually tagging a workspace, but let's tell the user we're just giving it a
> name.
>
> * Similarly, propose custom workspace names in Gnome Activity Journal, when
> the user wants to create a new tag. This allows the tagging-addicted user to
> discover a powerful way to manually define and redefine his/her activities.
>
> * Files/Apps explicitly related, or strongly related by contextual relevancy
> heuristics, to that tag (e.g. Music->Rhythmbox, ogg files, ...) will then be
> opened in that workspace, even if that means opening a new window of an
> already running app (e.g. Firefox opening songlyrics.net in "Music"
> workspace because the user explicitly tagged that website as Music).
> Unrelated or weakly related stuff should be opened in the current workspace,
> since this behaviour can't confuse the user. User can bypass this behaviour
> by dnd a file/app to the wanted workspace.
>
> Pros (imo):
> - giving a name to a workspace is something a user can easily understand, in
> particular if he gets sensible suggestions;
> - easy to revert! If get angry when Rhythmbox opens in a different ws than
> the current one, I can simply delete the "Music" workspace, because I can
> understand why gnome-shell was behaving like that (I KNOW that there's a ws
> named Music, where probably all music related stuff goes).
> - can be extended with automatic contextual relevancy algorithms, e.g.
> relating "lyrics.com" to Music just because I always browse it when
> listening to music. But it does not depend on this smart (and wonderful!)
> stuff: it works on a brand new system.
> - is integrated with Gnome Activity Journal or any other interface used to
> search and tag files.
> - Tagging stuff like "project XYZ due next week" will prove very useful if
> Zeitgeist+Tracker+Gnome Activity Journal land in Gnome 3.
>
>
> Cons (imo):
> - requires action by the user. (but not a difficult one)
> - many other that I don't see because I like my own idea :)
>
> One-line use cases:
> "Hey, it's smart! It opened octave in my Science desktop!" <- naming
> workspaces after tags (or app categories.. :)
> "It's even smarter! It also opened arxiv.org there, and I never told him
> to!" <- Zeitgeist magic, tracking contextual relevancy
> "I can tell him to open photos of last concert in my Free Time desktop!" <-
> tagging files after workspace names
>
> (I have some use cases in mind but don't want to make this mail even longer)
>
> Hope this was not too long. If you arrived here, thanks for reading!

Some interesting and new ideas here.  It is similar to some other task
grouping/naming/categorization ideas that have been proposed already.
As stated in one of those other threads I think these would be really
neat things to try to do as a Shell extension.  In part because I'm
not sure we really want the core experience to be about
categorization.  I think there are a lot of people who really dig
categorizing things - but not everyone - and not me :)

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and ideas,
Jon