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On 24/01/12 15:41, George Parker wrote:
On 24/01/12 13:49, Keith Abraham wrote:Thank you for that Keith, a very constructive reply to my post. Couldn't I do something similar by having multiple windows in KDE 3?On 24/01/12 12:43, paul sutton wrote:people work in different ways and the desktop should reflect this. PaulI agree that's why I use KDE's Activities a lot. I have 6 activities set up ie. 1. village newsletter 2. graphics work 3. writing text 4. music editing 5. video editing 6. general setupEach activity has the appropriate applications and with some useful plasmoids readily at hand.eg Scribus, okular, post-it plasmoid etc.Right click on the desktop, select the activity from the dialogue and the desktop changes and is instantly configured for that activity. complete with multiple virtual desktops. Even the wallpaper changes (eg. I always use a flat, greyish wallpaper picture when editing colour images).No more desktops cluttered with unnecessary icons or moving/minimising windows to get at an icon. No more vague notions of what is required to do a task.To me it's like being able to move to a different office, a place where everything is dedicated to one task only, where there is little to interfere with the task at hand.Keith
Hi George No. It's difficult to explain but I'll try to give it a try.A workflow can be understood as an activity. An activity has it's own workspace, tools and methods. Any major task on a computer can be viewed as an activity or series of activities.
For example my Newsletter Activity has the regular taskbar panel on the rleft of the screen (ie with Kicker, task manager and calendar etc. One the right (I've got a 16:9 monitor for films) I have a dock plasmoid with, say Scribus, Okular, Gimp and all the applications etc I need for DTP. (I could exclude the regular taskbar panel from all activities but I guess I like the security of having it around!)
Here for me is the interesting part. If I create a Text activity I can have a completly different setup altogether. For example the same daisy dock, but now it contains, say, Libreoffice and a other tools/plasmoid applicable to writing. And I can switch between these the two activities with a couple of mouse clicks.
Once set up these activities are always available (and each has it's own individual set of virtual desktops tied to that activity). I find it make my workflow much easier to manage. (I need it at my age!)
Apart from the usefulness to the individual user and in keeping a focus on the job in hand this concept can be used by a company to provide a uniform desktop and apply a particular activity to any individual's desktop.
Perhaps if you only use your desktop for one task, say, writing then perhaps activities is not for you but if you do use the desktop for many different tasks (I suspect most of us do) then applying the concept of Activities is IMHO very helpful.
IMHO for the most part you can consider KDE3 to be a subset of KDE4. KDE4 for can be setup to behave like KDE3 But I would not want to go back to that way of working. True some things are missing eg. I really miss the booklet printing from KDE3's print dialogue (due to the move to newer Qt libraries). But for me there are always applications or plasmoids available to replace the missing functions.
Activities in KDE4 (I believe Gnome 3 has something similar) seems to be a difficult concept for people to grasp and I suspect is a reason most people dislike kDE4 (and possibly Gnome3?). Perhaps I was lucky and understood it quite easily although I know I haven't begun to explore the possibilities.
There are people who can explain it far better than I can although you will have to look for them amongst all the haters of "the new desktops".
If you remain interested after my feeble explanation I suggest you have a look at the KDE website and do a bit of googling.
Keith -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------All e-mails including their file attachments are scanned for viruses and spam using Symantec's and ClamAV's scan engines.
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