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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Active Desktop (ish)
From:       Eric E <whalesuit () yahoo ! com>
Date:       2002-04-02 0:44:19
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> But  because in the proposal, this information is shown in the root window,
> it's covered by anything that's currently in focus. So it's mainly "useful"
> when my computer is not being otherwise used. What can placing a web page
> (or a Konqeror view of a folder) in my root window do that I can't
> accomplish by placing a link to that page or folder in my Autostart folder,
> besides diminish the usefulness of my desktop as a launchpad?

Well put!  To continue your metaphor, if you make 20 piles of paper on your
desktop, you haven't made it any easier to work with them than filing them
well in the filing cabinet (which is damn hard to do).

On the other hand....

IMHO the big benefit you can get out of organizing desktops into "projects"
 is that the user has then established a logical relationship between
 otherwise unrelated files - i.e., you've recorded important metadata with
 little to no extra work on the part of the user.
So, the association of virtual desktops with projects is a nice one if we can
figure out how to use it to transparently make connections between bits of
info.  Let's say in the simplest version, our desktop-project widget were to
keep a list of times that you were working in each virtual desktop (which of
course you can edit and remove at your discretion, true to the *nix
philosophy).  From this, it would be possible (and hopefully not too
difficult) to write an app (or even better an applet or kioslave) that
queried your filesystem, email stores, browsing history, etc. for any files
or emails written, or webpages viewed during that period.  (Probably you'd
need to set up some filtering to screen out kde.org and slashdot pageviews
;=) ).

You can use this same method to infer links between projects (If I always
 work on project B interspersed with project A, it's reasonable to think that
 the two are connected, so I might query for docs from both of them and sort
 by project)  The possibilities are pretty extensive.

So let's keep at this idea of associating virtual desktops with projects, and
at the very least, I request that we keep a time log switches into and out of
the virtual desktop.

Cheers,

Eric
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