Linking 'Activities' and recent documents

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Hi all!

I've read the WindowManagementAndMore [1] page on the Wiki, and I think
there are really interesting ideas not so hard to implement there. A
point that I've been thinking about for some time is the concept of
'Activities' meaning different contexts linking applications, documents
and other settings, for example workspaces or screens. Most of this can
be achieved from gnome-shell mainly using window management and
launchers.

But the issue of recent documents seems trickier to me, while it would
really be nice to have. The idea is that we need to tag a recent
document with a metadata like "activity:foo" so that you can show only
the documents used in this activity: this would make recent lists more
more useful, with documents more likely to be what you're looking for.
Think of OpenOffice.org Writer for your "Work" activity showing your
last business letter instead of the strange documents you read at home.
Or GEdit showing the source files used in gnome-shell rather than that
from nautilus you occasionally hacked yesterday.

Ideally, this would be implemented in GTK so that every application can
benefit from this feature without any change in their code.
GtkRecentManager could automatically add this information when adding a
document to the list, so that a new function allows to select files
corresponding to an activity. Though it would require GTK to guess what
is the current activity. This cannot really be related to an
application, but rather to a window, I think, which makes it quite
complex. There is a GtkRecentManager for each GdkScreen, but not one for
each 'Activity'.

Else, a new field in GtkRecentData could be added together with a
variant of gtk_recent_manager_add_item() that would allow specifiying
the activity as an argument, called from applications. Anyway, such a
change would be nice to standardize among free desktops, and is a more
long-term approach.

These are a few ideas, but maybe I've thought about it and you found a
better way to implement this. Maybe it can be trivial.


Keep up the good work!

1: http://live.gnome.org/Boston2008/GUIHackfest/WindowManagementAndMore