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Hi

Here are some proposals to improve (imho) activities in KDE. I hope to be constructive, well, at least I'm trying to.

Activities have been intriduced several years ago. Yet, if you google about "KDE activities", you'll get dozen of results. Most of them are about "understanding activities in KDE". This simple fact demonstrates that people are not so comfortable with activities.

I personnaly use them and like them a lot. But I have to admit that it can be quite confusing sometimes. Maybe I misunderstood something, but I personnaly think that it can be improved.

For me, an Activity is some kind of a Workspace that is customized in a way that makes a job easier to accomplish. For example, you could have a "Photo" activity where you have a Desktop with Digikam, another one with Dolphin, and another one with Krita. Or you could have a "Dev" activity with your favorite editor, rekonq with some doc, Konsole, etc. You could also have a "Download" activity running KTorrent, and a different set of plasmoids that are useful : bandwidth monitor, hard disk drive monitor, or whatever. This particular activity could be completed with a different power profile that will prevent the computer to suspend.

Those activities are really different. And I don't have the same needs for them.
Thus, I think that Activities should :

allow us to have a different number of virtual desktops per activity,
allow us to have a different set of panels.

There is something I often see when reading about KDE Activities : the difference between activities and virtual desktops seems to be hard to understand.
And I think this is quite understandable.
See, when I'm coding, I often get disturbed by some notifications coming from another activity, or by a tray icon that increments (Chokoq for example).
The fact is that I don't want to be disturbed by those when I'm coding, this is why I put Chokoq on another activity. If I wanted to be "disturbed", I would have used another Desktop, not another Activity.
As a consequence, I really believe that each activity should be independent. To get a step further, I think that :

tray applications should be forbidden,
multi-activities applications should be forbidden (they add confusion between virtual desktops and activities),
notifications/jobs should stay in their own activity (what's that notification when playing my movie ?).

Finally, I really think that activities switching is a pain. We should find a better way to switch from one to another. Something accessible even if I run a fullscreen application. I thought a bit about it and sadly don't have anything really concrete to propose. Maybe we could get inspired by the existing applications switching systems or even the desktops switching ones ?

I think, that different panels per activity is a great idea. One could have for example two activities: KDE-like and Mac OS X-like. In KDE-like one could have a panel in the bottom with task manager, Kickoff etc.; and in Mac OS X could have a panel in the top without task manager, but with app-menu, and dock in the bottom.

The separated panels were requested years back for different virtual desktops when KDE 4.0 alpha and beta was released and it was impossible at that time. Then they were requested again when activities were developed. Problems were in plasma and now when plasma2 is under development, hopefully they do implement the feature to allow activities AND virtual desktops to have different panel setups.

re: per-activity desktops: I thought there was a brainstorm topic for this suggestion, but searching through the ideas that have been suggested, it looks like a number have mentioned it in part of some greater idea (usually coupled with either per-activity/desktop panels, or multi-monitor handling) but it hasn't been suggested in its own separate idea. otoh, there is the Workflow project which aims to provide this and other related functionality.

re: Tray applications forbidden: You could try just not using the system tray. I was doing that while I was using 4.10 due to the system tray causing plasma to crash, and it caused a number of headaches including: I was regularly switching to kmail to check for new messages (bad work habits) because I didn't have the indicator to tell me how many messages I had (and none of the other plasmoids were working); I had to add workarounds for certain non-kde apps (music and IM, in particular) which don't integrate with the other kde/plasma controls; opening up many of the tray-only apps (or tray-first apps) was an exercise in persistence (searching the dbus interface for the command to show the window because there was no other way that I know of to open them up - in particular: kmix).
Others may have other tray-only apps which they rely on which would require similar workarounds, so forbidding tray applications is not an option.
OTOH, I do like the idea of associating certain notifications with activities and/or associating tray apps with activities (and blocking all notifications when on a specific activity).

re: multi-activity applications should be forbidden: I don't there is much confusion since you have to go two very distinct paths to reach the toggle for making an application multi-activity vs. multi-desktop (right-click -> Activities -> All Activities vs. right-click -> Move to Desktop -> All Desktops). OTOH, tray apps are by nature multi-activity (you expect klipper and kmix to be accessible from any activity, don't you?), but there are some applications where the tray icon is a secondary interface to the application and should have an option to disable the tray icon (e.g. in kmail: Settings -> Configure Kmail -> Appearance -> System Tray, there is a checkbox to enable/disable the tray icon. I should hope that Chokoq has a similar option).
OTOH, there are valid cases where you would want certain applications on multiple activities, for instance, IM (and mail) clients (unless you could easily associate a given conversation with an activity as it happens), in my particular case, I have the Netbeans IDE associated with both my coding activity and my code reviews activity; I might also associate a given python konsole session with both my main (java) coding activity and with my python tools activity.

re: activity switching: have you tried the different activity plasmoids (using workflow project's plasmoids)? Have you tried using keybindings?

First, thanks for your reading and answers.

otoh, there is the Workflow project which aims to provide this and other related functionality.

Yep, I'm not really convinced by the implementation but I have to admit that Michail did a huge and impressive work. He really catches something with this project.

About tray applications, I wasn't clear enough. I wasn't thinking about "system applications" (Klipper, Kmix, KWallet and such...). I was thinking about applications like Chokoq, IM or even Amarok. I really don't understand why they can be docked in the systray.
But even with Klipper, KMix, etc... It could be great to have a sound level depending on the activity. Or to have a Klipper dedicated to its activity so that it isn't polluted with stuff from others activities, couldn't it ?

I should have be more precise about multi-activity applications too

Let's take an example :

I'm working with Activity 1, I open Whatever application on Desktop 3 and I ask it to stay on Activity 2.
If I switch to Activity 2, the Whatever application will be on Desktop 3. The problem is that I may have only one Desktop in Activity 2. So, the app will switch to Desktop 1 in Activity 2. That's OK.
The problem occurs when switch back to Activity 1, my Whatever application will have moved to Desktop 1 instead of staying on Desktop 3.

We face some inconsistence here. This is why I suggest to forbid this. If I need Whatever application in Activity 2, I should be able to whether start a new instance of this application OR move the existing instance from Activity 1 to Activity 2.

Regarding applications that are multi-activity by nature (those that can be docked in the tray), I really think it adds confusion for users.

Let me take another example :

I start an IM client in my "I have nothing better to do" Activity, I may not want it in my "Super important work" one. Instead, I'd rather want it to automatically switch my status to "Occupied" and keep the notifications in my "I have nothing better to do" Activity.
If I still want to be able to chit-chat with my friends or co-workers, I would have moved the IM client (and related chats) to my "Super important work" activity.

OTOH, there are valid cases where you would want certain applications on multiple activities, for instance, IM (and mail) clients (unless you could easily associate a given conversation with an activity as it happens), in my particular case, I have the Netbeans IDE associated with both my coding activity and my code reviews activity; I might also associate a given python konsole session with both my main (java) coding activity and with my python tools activity.

I think you misunderstood me I wasn't proposing to forbid people to run the same application in several actvities ! My idea was to forbid the same instance of one application to run in several activities at the same time.

All this leads me to another (yet very extrem) idea : since the goal of activities is to focus on one task (hacking, managing your photos, reviewing code, ...), is there a good reason for us to let the user run several activities at the same time ?

Edit : fixed the markup.