Re: Concept attached + ideas

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le jeudi 05 novembre 2009 à 06:41 -0800, Brian Fleeger a écrit :
> 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. 
It's not completely dead, at least in my mind, but technical issues were
the most problematic part to me, rather than UI design. Good to have
some mock-ups, though. Happy to see that this concept is relatively
popular, and comes back from time to time.

BTW, I've written my ideas about this concept some time ago on the Wiki,
see [1]. But I've been drawn by many other things, and I can't really
solve the most problematic questions alone (see below).


[Not commenting on the mockups themselves, I'm really more concerned
about the feasibility for now.]

> 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?
I can't speak for the main developers, but from my initial plans it
seems to be possible, and even quite easy as regards documents, by
sending the desktop context (as we finally decided to call it)
information to Zeitgeist, i.e. telling it what's the current "saved
workspace" used.

Now, the hard part is obviously window state saving/restoring, because
ATM nobody knows which way we should go WRT session management. I guess
Dan could give us and interesting analysis of the problem, but basically
the traditional and complex XSMP system should be dropped in favor of
something new, but not really designed yet (see bug report [2]). The
question is, should applications do all the state saving by themselves
or should there be a library for that, and if yes, to which extent, and
how.

What we would need to save/restore a workspace (or desktop context) is a
way for applications to save *several distinct states*, and not load
them until they are asked to. As far as I can tell, this should be
possible today using XSMP, but that makes a session management system
quite complex to handle. So the replacement may only handle one state
per application (see gnome-terminal or Firefox today), making it work
right - but sadly not for our use case here. Would it be worth designing
a more complex protocol? I can't really tell. Hope others may help
answering...


Cheers


1: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/DesktopContexts
2: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79285