Hi, Sorry for the slow response.
On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 10:01 AM, Gianluca Inverso <[email protected]> wrote: > 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! Some interesting and new ideas here. It is similar to some other task grouping/naming/categorization ideas that have been proposed already. As stated in one of those other threads I think these would be really neat things to try to do as a Shell extension. In part because I'm not sure we really want the core experience to be about categorization. I think there are a lot of people who really dig categorizing things - but not everyone - and not me :) Thanks for sharing your thoughts and ideas, Jon _______________________________________________ gnome-shell-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list
