Re: Workspaces are not activities (was Re: interapplication communication)

[Felipe Erias Morandeira <femorandeira igalia com>]

It seems that we were having trouble with the terminology :-)

Owen Taylor wrote:
> Plus, the fact that workspaces are the most prominent thing in the
> "Activities" screen, makes people jump to the conclusion that a
> workspace is an activity. (We've considered adding text to the new
> workspace button to say "New Workspace" to try and help with that.)

Some people would say that if you need to label it so people can
understand what you really mean, then there might be some problem in the
design...

> But it's not the case. Workspaces are Workspaces. Activities are the
> things you are doing with your computer, like the currently running
> applications.

There is actually a "Human Activity Theory" that originated in Soviet
psychology in the early XX century, and that has been adapted to
human-computer interaction in the last couple of decades:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activity_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_activity_theory

I was thinking about Activities as the processes that are undertaken by
a person in order to achieve high-level goals. Activities are then
subdivided into individual Tasks. This is dynamic, so the object of an
Activity or the Tasks that compose it can change over time.

Still, I understand that talking about "Workspaces" and
"Windows/Applications/Documents/..." might be more clear.

The point is, I thought that the GNOME Shell's conceptual model followed
these or similar ideas. Specifically, I thought that

>> the activity-task hierarchy is the basis of the conceptual model
>> of the Shell

and that, therefore, an Activity would be a workspace. Each Activity
would then contain a number of Tasks, which could be applications,
windows, documents, etc...

> I think you are right that if we were designing about groups of
> activities like this, then we'd want to design things differently. But
> since we're not designing around groups of activities, the Activities
> Overview is meant to be the place you manage your activities:
> 
>  - start applications
>  - find documents
>  - switch between windows

So, it seems that I got the conceptual model wrong. My bad.

Still, from a design perspective I think that it would be very useful to
clarify the main concepts and the relationships between them. The
following model:

  Activity = Workspace
      Task = application/window/document/...

  each Activity contains several Tasks which are relevant
  to its high-level goal

  the hierarchy can be modified dynamically

is attractive for some people, and I thought that it was the one behind
the GNOME Shell. If we are not following that, I would like to know what
model it is that we are following.


Kind regards,

Felipe