Tabbed plasming

Software

Quick video: this is a proof of concept plasmoid i wrote quite some time ago and then forgotten to talk about 🙂
Is a little tabbar meant to be put in a panel that lists all your desktop activities and lets you switch them in a quick way, as seen in the video it also keeps itself syncronized if something changes, so if you switch with the zoom user interface it switches accordingly, it creates and remove tabs when desktops are created or removed.

The name of the tab is the name of the activity you can set in the desktop wallpaper/theme/etc configuration dialog.
The name it’s just the beginning of the activity concept, in the future the desktops and the applets in it will be aware and will react to their context, like what time is it, is the network attached or not, heck even what is our geographic coordinate…
But that’s another and more exciting story that just a teeeny tab bar :p


Ogg theora version

15 thoughts on “Tabbed plasming”

  1. Hans

    Am I correct to assume that it is a containment now? I played with the applet in playground awhile ago. Yes, at that time it was just an applet; when I switched activity the tabbar disappeared too. The video shows that this isn’t the case anymore – great!

    Another huge improvement is the the name reflects the activity name, and not only its type. This was probably what annoyed me most when I tried it out.

    I can see this being used alot. Just think future netbooks.

  2. Aaron Seigo

    in the video, it’s been placed into a panel at the top of the screen, so it doesn’t go anywhere.

    as for naming activities, yes, this is something we added as part of the Context work for 4.2 .. =)

  3. Re: Re: What is it?

    Hm that’s strange. See, I tried to add it to a panel too. =)
    (But geez, it even said so in the blog entry! Sorry for missing that).

    Could it be my multi monitor setup that made it acting weird? Guess this means I have to try it out again.

  4. Patrick Spear

    This is a great development. I love the direction kde4 has taken and applaud and support every design decision that has been made- apart from the ZUI. Its functionality is just far too similar to multiple desktop functionality to be not be awkward in its execution. Multiple activities- good idea. Context aware activities- GREAT idea. Zooming in and out as the method of manipulating them- creates two identical systems (apps + VDs and plasmoids + activities) within something that should be cohesive. A combo box (or tab bar as shown here) would be a perfectly acceptable method of switching manually between activities- there could even be thumbnails adjacent to the name (a la plasma theme picker), or ever a ZUIish thumbnail view as a feature if the user needs it. But goes through the ZUI by default is simply more interface than is needed to do the job. I’d back up my views a bit further, but don’t want to take up too much space here.

  5. Martin

    I cannot understand how this differs from the multiple desktop functionality which I believe is already there through the Pager plasmoid.

    Can someone explain?

  6. Martin

    I cannot understand how this differs from the multiple desktop functionality which I believe is already there through the Pager plasmoid.

    Can someone explain?

  7. Paul

    This is something I like, an Activity bar. I especially like ease for naming an activity- it helps me focus on the job to have the activity name constantly visible (unlike a desktop name). It would be excellent if it could work with a session manager- so activities can be saved and reactivated later. Cheers.

  8. TheBlackCat

    This is great! I have always thought activities were a great idea, and missed an easy way to switch between them. This looks like a great way to do that.

    @ Martin: To put it simply, desktops are collections of windows, activities are collections of plasmoids. The two are independent of each other. So the activities allows you to have multiple collections of desktop plasma applets, a different wallpaper (or even different desktop containment), different size, location, orientation, and content for the panel, etc. The windows are independent (or at least can be) of the activity you are using, so you can switch activities while keeping the same open windows.

  9. Raul

    This is just great!!

    However I have a question: it is posible to have windows confined to activities? just like they are now confined to only one virtual desktop. If you can do that and you can add an option to the panel that says “show only entries for the activity that you are using” then it would be just perfect, because in this way your activities would include plasmoids AND applications.

    Thanks for developing this, and keep up the good job!

  10. Marco Martin

    connection between that and virtual desktop: right now they are two totally separate things, in the future we will eventually have the possibility to “link” different activities to different virtual desktop
    multi monitor yeah, it could be that it breaks something, really lacks testing from my side 🙂

  12. Ramon Antonio Parada

    I never liked the Zoom thing. It just doesn’t make sense that you have to zoom out, see a broken background and then zoom in. I like tabs.

  14. daniel-san

    Good work and nice handler’s icons. Why dont you do the scrollbars (like the one in the folderview) look like the sliders that you make? I like the colour scheme that you use for them, but i think the shapes are not the smoothest. However you’re great!!!

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