Tagging Workspaces

[Gianluca Inverso <zappete gmail com>]

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!

Best,

Gianluca

(*) I'm still confused about all that Zeitgeist/Tracker stuff, so please be patient if I've mixed one thing with another.