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 _______________________________________________ gnome-shell-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list
