From kde-core-devel Mon Oct 01 22:54:17 2001 From: Richard Moore Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2001 22:54:17 +0000 To: kde-core-devel Subject: Re: Improving task manager interaction X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=100197681901907 Martijn Klingens wrote: > > On Mon, 1 Oct 2001, Richard Moore wrote: > > I've done a lot of thinking and a bit of research about this so far. > > I've coded a few prototypes (some hacks to kasbar, and a 1st cut > > taskinfo class), but I haven't started coding the real thing yet. The > > biggest challenge has been to figure out how to maximise the > > compatibility of this with the existing standards. > > > > So far I have come to a number of conclusion through this research: > > -- snip -- > > > 11. A document has (at least) the following state flags: > > - bool active // The doc is being worked on by the user > > - bool modified // The doc differs from the copy on disk > > - bool ready // The document can be edited > > - bool busy // The doc is currently busy performing an operation > > - bool progressInfo // The doc can tell us how much of the op is done > > - bool needsUser // The doc is waiting for the user to talk to it > > - bool changedOutput // The document has been changed by someone else > > > > 12. A task has (at least) the following state flags, and also > > inherits those of a document: > > - bool hasMultipleDocuments // This task contains >1 document > > - bool hasDCOP // This task can provide a DCOP id > > An idea that Rob Kaper came up with and that I think is pretty nice is to > have next to the modified flag a 'status' icon. Then it would be possible > in a game to show a set of dice next to the app's icon if it's your turn. > For many other apps it would also be quite useful to have such a thing. > KMail can show an icon if there is new mail. Konq can show a progress bar > showing how much of a page is loaded, etc... I think the overlay stuff I refered to should be able to handle this, the idea is that you should be able to blend additional information into the basic icon. > > Might be worth implementing? > > And something that I would like is to remove the distinction between > documents and tasks, though I understood from your mail that you are > planning that already. I don't want to remove the concept of a task entirely, but I do want to make things document-centric. A task would become an aggregation of docs in my view, but would also be able to define properties of its own. Without retaining some concept of a task, I don't see how the API could correctly report things like application-modal dialogs. Note that the presence of tasks in the API does not mean that there would be any requirement that a given task manager should display them - it may choose to be 100% document-based. Ultimately, I'd also like to see the somewhat more advanced concept of a 'project'. The project would represent a user-defined group of documents, instead of an artifact of the implementation like the task. > > What I would like is to have all my konsole sessions still use a single > window as they do now, but not have their own "task bar", but instead add > an entry to the normal task bar for each session. > > Since I sometimes have multiple konsole windows and sometimes multiple > sessions I often find myself pressing alt-tab when shift-arrow is needed > and vice versa. Not quite intuitive IMO :-) But again, I think you already > planned this, I just wanted to mention it in case you didn't. This is possible within the framework I describe, though it will require a task manager that understands the extra set of hints. > > > -- more snip -- > > > I'm very interested in working with a group of people on this because > > to work, it needs to be pretty much universal. What do you think of the > > above? Am I on the right track? > > For what I could actually understand it looks good. But there are some > pretty low-level parts that I didn't completely understand yet ;-) Feel free to ask about them - if nothing else, you'll be forcing me to write the documentation/specification. ;-) Cheers Rich. > > Martijn