Hi, folks, this is an interesting passage regarding activity-based computing from the book "The invisible computer", by Donald A. Norman: > "Make it possible to have all the material needed for an > activity ready at hand, available with little or no mental > overhead. Tools, documents, and information are gathered > together into packages maximally designed for the particular > activities in which they participate, without interfering with > other activities. Of course, it must be possible to make > changes in the choices and to switch rapidly and easily among > the activities. Finally, items not needed for the current > activity are hidden so they do not distract and do not take up > valuable work space. > > An activity is a goal-directed set of tasks. [...] > > Work within any single activity can take a long time. It may > involve numerous people. As a result, it is necessary to allow > different people to share the activity spaces, and to figure > out how to coordinate the work so that one person's actions > do not interfere with another's. > > Because activities take place over extended periods, it is > necessary to make it possible to make it possible to return > to the tasks without disruption." As you can see, the main idea of activity-based computing is to focus on users' activities instead of on files and applications, providing functionality for storing and restoring an activity's context. Or, as the people in www.activitybasedcomputing.com put it: > "In activity-based computing, the basic computational unit > is no longer the file or the application but the activity of > a user. The end-user is directly supported by computational > activities which can be initiated, suspended, stored, resumed, > and shared on any computing device in the infrastructure at > any point in time, handed over to other persons, or shared > among several persons. Furthermore, the execution of > activities is adapted to the usage context of the users, > i.e. making activities context-aware." (they use the example of a hospital) I am talking about this here because I have read in many places (i.e. http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Features ) that Gnome and Gnome Shell will be focused in activities, but it seems that its goal is not as ambitious as the concept of activity-based computing that I am talking about. I wonder if anyone has interest in discussing a bit these concepts, as I think that it could be interesting to rethink the basic ideas about how users are using our systems. Regards, Felipe
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