Hi all,
Jimmy’s idea is very interesting to me as an innovative new form of document browsing and grouping – like a meta document. People floated the idea of an “activity” being a saved group/family of apps and documents months ago, but the idea died out because there was no clear way how to do it or how the UI might fit in with shell. Ignoring the back-end challenges, Jimmy’s mock-up seems very compelling because it uses several visual cues and interaction metaphors already common from web browsers, like “favorites”, “pinning” a window, and naming folders full of grouped favorite websites. Below are mockups and a couple of questions for developers.
I drew five mockups combining Jimmy’s mockup with some of my own ideas, trying to change the current Gnomeshell layout as little as possible.
Pic 1) http://www.flickr.com/photos/26671354 N05/4077152728/in/photostream/
A profile of a star that would appear in the upper corner of any workspace when you mouse over it in overlay mode. Clicking on the star could activate a prompt that would be dispayed over top of the workspace itself, asking the user to name the “Favorite Activity Group,” and giving a radio button to indicate whether it has a due date.
Pic 2) http://www.flickr.com/photos/26671354 N05/4076422785/in/photostream/
If the user clicks that it has a due date, some blanks would appear so the user could select when it is due.
Pic 3) http://www.flickr.com/photos/26671354 N05/4076462783/in/photostream/
Once an activity space is denoted as a favorite, it can be closed even if it has open windows – all windows would be saved automatically as they were at closing, pinning them to that window.
Pic 4) http://www.flickr.com/photos/26671354 N05/4077799608/in/photostream/
Additional windows could be “pinned” to the already starred favorite activity later too (the pins I did are ugly, sorry!). Pinning is to alleviate some of the AI issues that come up with a totally automated system by asking the user to manage which windows are associated themselves. Pinned windows would all open automatically when that favorite workspace is opened, even if they had been closed previously. If you rename a previously pinned document, the newly named document should take on the pinned status. If you take a previously pinned document and use “save as” to create a new version, the new version should be pinned, and the older version un-pinned.
Pic 5) http://www.flickr.com/photos/26671354 N05/4077046343/in/photostream/
A menu could be added in the bottom right corner in Overlay near the plus sign to interact with saved activity group states.
There are lots of UI and back-end problems that could come up, but I would like to ask any of the developers: is this thread and the idea of saved app/doc families complete pie-in-the-sky talk, or is any semblance of this doable or desirable (i.e. could problems with saved window states be overcome)? If it is doable, do you think it could be done in a discoverable or usable way? Could Zeitgeist provide the foundation for this?
Thank you,
Brian Fleeger