So, work on activities has been so overwhelming that I’ve had no time to do anything else lately (KDE-related).

Service

First, the kded module and the nepomuk service that were present in KDE SC 4.5 are no more - they are now merged into one application called kactivitymanagerd (KDE ActivityManager Dæmon). The reason behind this rewrite was to have a more stable system (no crashing kded on dbus locks etc.) and to make it easier to maintain.

Identicons

We have new identicons, fully themable. Since one picture is worth more than no picture at all, here they are:

Activity identicons

Configuration

As you can see in the screenshot above, there are two corner-actions for each activity - one to stop or delete it, and another one for configuring the name and the icon.

If you remember, the ‘old’ place for configuring the above was in the ‘desktop settings’ dialogue. It was really the wrong place - this is the activity manager, it should manage all related to them.

Confirm removal

Change info

If Nepomuk is not running, changing the icon will be disabled.

Edit: The layout in the shots is not showing the whole text of the label - it has been fixed.

Smaller stuff

Few of the things above required rewriting quite big chunks of code, removing a more than few hacks and refactoring. So while all that was happening, I had the opportunity to change a few visually irritating things as well. The most important usability problem was the fact that we didn’t differentiate the current activity from the others.

UI

Templates

Others were also busy, so Chani and Mario started making the templating system for creating and sharing activities, but I’m not going to write about that - I’ll leave it to them - I’ll just post a screenshot of what the ‘Add activity’ looks like at the moment.

Add activity

That’s all for now, so long and thanks for all the squids.