Recently, I wrote a post about the KDE 4.5 SC release candidate. In that post, I was a little bit critical about the discoverability of desktop activities. I wasn’t too sure of what the purpose of these were, and there was nothing in the interface for creating these activities that gave the user any hint of what they were. Whilst I stand by that criticism, I’ve found a great article that explains the purpose of desktop activities, how they work and how they may integrate into a user’s desktop. There is also a slightly older article that provides particular individual examples of how desktop activities might be used. Unfortunately the KDE userbase article on the point is deeply inadequate as an explanation of how you might use this feature.

Whilst I now understand how these features work and might be used, I still don’t understand how this might improve my workflow. It may be that because I’ve never been a big fan of desktop widgets – despite the fact that I developed one of the most popular superkaramba themes ever – liquidweather ;-) I understand that, in addition to being able to put different wallpapers and plasmoids on different activities, you can specify the activity on which each application opens. This could be a useful way to organise yourself, but it has always been possible to specify which virtual desktop a particular application opens on. Activities to me seem to be simply an extension of the virtual desktop metaphor.

However, the lead developer of plasma, Aaron Seigo, has promised further development around Nepomuk, potentially taking desktop activities to a whole new level:

The Plasma Desktop is going even further with Activities. We now have the ability to store, retrieve and mark as “active” which desktop activity you are working on. There is no file anywhere that maps to this. KWin will be gaining the ability to map windows to these activities, and any other application (KDE or not!) can also choose to map internal data and settings to activities and take appropriate action when the Activity context changes. The mechanism that ties this together? Nepomuk. Since we’re using Nepomuk, we get the ability to tie documents and other URL based locations together with Activities as well .. for free.

Unfortunately, I would imagine the implementation of these features won’t be quick. First, the KDE SC 4.6 feature plan doesn’t show any new features in this area being developed. Secondly, the Nepomuk integration needs to be made more universal amongst applications, and then that Nepomuk integration needs to be linked to desktop activities. Given how slow developers have been to integrate Nepomuk to date, I’m not holding my breath.