APR
25
2015
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Building on new pillars: Activities and KPeople in Plasma 5.3With the release of Plasma 5.3 only days away, it's time to start talking about some of the new features users of Plasma Desktop will get their hands on in the new version. Activities Many Plasma Desktop users are already familiar with Activities as a toolbox to divide and organize their personal computing environment into shards: You can set up and name activities, distribute application windows across them, associate relevant files with them, switch between, start and stop them to your heart's content. A previously less explored side to the Activities story is what the technology can offer while working inside any one of your activities - thus even if you don't bother with setting up more than one and just stick to the default activity created for you the first time you log into Plasma. This changes with Plasma 5.3! New work to make it easier for applications to enter useful data into the activity's knowledge store, as well as run smart queries against it, enable some new and improved functionality in both the Application Menu and Task Manager widgets in this release. In Application Menu, all of the Recent categories (one of which is new) are now powered by Activities. One immediate advantage of this is that their contents now change with the activity you're in, but as promised it also provides several other inherent benefits: ![]() The three Recent categories in Application Menu 5.3
KPeople ![]() Recent Contacts in Application Menu 5.3: Powered by Activities and KPeople The KPeople framework allows applications (including the shell) to retrieve lists of people and information about them (status, contact metadata), as well as perform actions on them - e.g. initiate a chat, as used by Application Menu when you click on an entry in the Recent Contacts category. The data backing this interface is provided by backend plugins. The first implementer of a fully-featured KPeople backend is of course our very own Telepathy instant messenging suite. In the future, other KDE communication apps will integrate with KPeople, making conversations had e.g. in KDE's IRC client Konversation pop up in Application Menu as well. Closing thoughts Both the enhanced Activities backend and KPeople are very fresh. While we work hard to line up everything behind them (implement additional data sources and optimize those implementations, for example), they are still exposed somewhat carefully in Plasma Desktop 5.3. The Recent Contacts category in Application Menu, for example, is disabled in this release by default, because a Telepathy release entering conversation data into the Activities knowledge store is still pending. It can be enabled from the widget's config dialog. In future releases you can expect us to make more of these pillars as our confidence grows, with additional UI functionality built on them and more prominent placements of it in various areas of the shell. Lots of work ahead! |
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Comments
Technically speaking we've
Technically speaking we've had per-application recent docs since at least KDE 2 (our file dialogs remember recently opened files), but exposing them in app launchers in specific ways can well have popped up in other desktop shells before. We don't claim good ideas as being KDE's exclusive domain :). In the end what matters is what brings value to our users.
It's made possible by an improved system to store and retrieve that information, which is one of the main thrusts of that post: We can implement features that make use of recent files or events in arbitrary UI very easily now. Bushan Shah's post on using the query API in Plasma Media Center is a nice example.
recent folders
would it be possible to have a recent folder tab. Ehen you work for one project I would use always a few folders where I open and save files. to have recent folders would be great for open and save dialog and also for Dolphin.
thanks
We could use the Activities
We could use the Activities backend to experiment with functionalities like this, yep!
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