Activities rock!
I think I’ve got the hang of desktop activities now. For a while I liked the idea in theory, and even had a couple, but never really used them because I didn’t use a lot of widgets— I’m of the empty-screen school. But I do a lot of things that do require stuff on the screen, and that’s what I’ve discovered activities are in fact for.
Here’s my “communications” activity that I use when I want to be in the world:
It has the twitter applet —in fact two of them, one to update the private twitter I made to keep track of house-cleaning in Lent, very boring and only followed by myself— and a fuzzy clock (I love the fuzzy clock!), and currently displays a konsole with my irssi session that lives on the server. I’d use konversation if I knew how to run that on the server and have it always connected, as irssi is, but it does have a certain retro charm to do irc in plain text.
Here’s the activity I use to work on the church webpage:
One folderview with the html and css files in the local working directory (yay filters) and one with the folders of the news blog. I intend to add folderviews with the remote site (where it in fact is) but the network was down when I made the activity so I haven’t got round to that yet.
This one is for the roleplaying blog, especially my current project of indexing all the names in it:
Folderviews of all relevant folders. I wish I could confine open files and Konqueror sessions to one specific activity, too! That would be almost like having several different computers. Sometimes it’s useful to change activities “from under” something that’s open, sometimes I’d like my files, web pages etcetera to stay in their cage (note to self: find someone’s, I think Aaron’s, instructions on assigning an activity to a desktop or vice versa; it might just do the trick).
This is the “default” activity for when I don’t want do be distracted by tweets and folderviews, for instance when I’m writing something:
I may desaturate or grayscale the background picture because at the moment it’s rather distractingly blue.
I think the breakthrough came when I realised that I don’t have to set up an activity beforehand and think carefully about what I want for one specific job, but I can set it up on the fly, add to it, change it, delete it when it’s no longer needed or just let it sit there and forget it until I need it again. I’ve now got an activity tab bar in my panel (I’ll probably experiment with different settings) to see whether that’s better than ctrl-shift-n’ing through all the screens until I get the one I want. One thing I notice is that I’ll probably end up giving all the activities short(ish) names so they fit.
Posted: 05-Mar-2009 | /wireless_life/applications | link | 6 comments
