Re: Linking 'Activities' and recent documents

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sun, 2009-01-11 at 23:02 +0100, Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote:

> 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'.

I think modifying the data in the overlay to take into account the
current activity is a pretty neat idea. I'd certainly like to see
someone do some prototyping around the idea of activities being more
than just workspaces.

We also had the idea in a discussion yesterday that you could
potentially do the same thing for web browser history ... especially if
"recent pages" or "recent sites" was integrated into the overlay in some
fashion.

Modifying GTK+ to write in the current workspace or activity for each
document would certainly be an approach, but since the whole idea of
activities isn't really worked out yet, its maybe a bit premature...
that is, to have to modify GTK+ just to prototype this out will make it
hard to try things out.

A different approach would be for the shell to observe bookmarks being
added to recently-used.xbel and to either keep a look-aside database 
or edit the history to include extra metadata about the current
workspace.

(See the connection to the 'changed' signal of recentManager for where
you would hook in when new documents get added.)

- Owen