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have you ever used a mac? on a mac, you only have one menu bar at the top and it changes based on the window that has focus ..at it simplicity, that is what he is saying ..having one thing(or a bunch of them) that changes based on what you are doing(or is happening)

for example, lets say you are working on 4 projects and you have 4 groups of people in your kopete contact list that you are collaborating with on your projects ..you can work on each project on a separate virtual desktop and with this, you can attach each group on your kopete contact list to a particular desktop and you will only see a particular group of people based on what you are doing .. effectively, you will use whatever he is talking about to have kopete responds to a particular desktop ..


the idea already exists in KDE, you can have amarok play a particular song when a particular user log in in kopete using dcop(and i think dbus in kde4) ..the idea is the same, they are just extending it to plasma ..

all in all kde and any other apps that tie into this could in theory learn your habits and patterns and predict what you want to do when something happens.

i recall reading about a similar system being tested out at microsoft, something about a mail app looking at the content of the mail and being able to set up meetings and so on based on that...

if it works, it will be like having a secretary that do what things before you tell her, as she have learned how you behave.

or if you want the funny interpretation, take a look at the early seasons of mash. radar pulls this on the colonel all the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_O%27Reilly

Ah, so you mean all the stuff I hate about working on a Mac and all the stuff I hated when they did it to Windows (like the so called 'personalized menus')

The problem with this kind of technology is that it has to know what you want to do better than you or it will end up being another Clippy or Microsoft Bob. Anything less intelligent than yourself ends up getting in the way.
If someone breaks into your house you don't want your Nepomuk-powered tool to decide that you intended to use camera instead of gun because you use camera more than gun towards people.

Well .. you will need some imagination and bit of understanding.

With technolgies like this you will be able to adapt your whole desktop and all its apps to different needs.

Simple example:

Work mode: You only get IMs/emails/etc from coworkers and RSS feeds you need. Your desktop displays the files you work on.

Then you decide to take a break and switch off work mode and all the other IMs/emails/etc get displayed. And your desktop shows comics, twitter widgets .. whatever..

Not a very good example, but basically it boils down to: The desktop and all apps can adapt to you and change depending on the stuff you do.

The key question is, how many people are actually moded this way?

At work, I work on multiple projects. I suppose each project can be a mode, but since there's a huge amount of overlap between most projects, why bother?

I also notice that many people around me have their personal Gmails, Dilbert's, and IM's open at work, so the boundary between home and work isn't too clear here either.

The work-home also assumes that you're work computer and home computer are the same. That's a very small percentage of the people (people with laptops and home based entrepreneurs).

I guess I don't get the reason for the semantic desktop. Then again, I don't get the reason for being excited about "Desktop search" technologies like tracker. I rarely lose my files since they're mostly well organized, so searching is rarely needed. And for the people I've seen who put all their stuff on the desktop so that it's wall to wall icons, it really doesn't take that long to find a file since you can see it all.

You can also see that as a filter.

Normally you filter files, mails etc. in a per application habit, this though filters plasmoids and data like mails, rss-feeds etc. according to specified settings in all apps you want.

Basically it makes it possibly to have lots of plasmoids and still not getting overwhelmed or needing to create an activity (part of the Zooming User Interface).


E.g. you work on a project.
For that you created an own profile for your editor (Kate), set a different language for the spellchecker, have many files on your hd and on a server (maybe svn), a lot emails, many bookmarks and some people you work with...

If you tell your computer that you are working on said project -- maybe by choosing that in a plasmoid or by connecting to the company's network -- you'd get a Folderview Plasmoid with the files and if you start your editor -- if it's not started automatically -- the correct profile would be automatically chosen.
The email plasmoid would only show mails connected to that project and would play a sound if you get an email by the project leader. You'd also have the bookmarks accessible on your Desktop as well as the comic applet set to Dilbert comics (the project leader is not that capable ).

Yet you would not get distracted by friends over IM (set for Not Available eg.) or per mail. You could even say that you don't want to hear certain types of songs when working.

Additionally you don't want to be bothered with all that after your working time, no sounds when getting mails from the project leader ...


When finished this should enable you to easily have everything you need in range and clean it up later without you doing all that and be annoyed if you forgot to do so. The desktop would be more like the real thing, nothing static but something that changes when needed.

And best is if you don't need all that you don't have to use it.

Edited 2008-09-05 23:53 UTC

Maybe It's the fact that you have 3 decades of computing experience that is preventing you from getting it?

I don't mean this in a disparaging way but over time people get set in their ways and stop seeing other methods as being useful to them

Well I've got 3 decades of computing experience too, and it seem blindingly obvious to me that semantic web/desktop technologies like RDF, triple store databases, ontologies and so on are really important and are beginning to have a big impact. If someone can't be bothered to find out about them and why they might matter, then that is nothing to do with how old they are.

I would say that defining what is meant by a 'context' involves 'applied philosophy of epistemology' and that is hardly a new subject.

If you see triple stores are a different sort of database, then they are perhaps more similar to pre-relational database systems, such as IDMS where you had networks of data, that are more like RDF graphs than the tables in today's dbs.

If you were familiar with prolog a long time ago, then 'subject predicate object' rules hardly look very strange.

I think describing something you haven't bothered to find out about as 'nonsense' or 'cute gibberish' is just plain lazy.

I use the concept of Context this way: upon login I determine whether I'm at work, at home or at some other location (ping specific network nodes). If I'm at work, I want a screen saver to be password protected, a signature for emails and email settings are different than those when I'm at home. Also, indentation styles and coloring for Emacs are different. Different applications are started and desktop menu is different depending on my LOCATION environment variable.

So I definitely think that the notion of a Context is useful and it's good if we could configure application depending on contexts.