Gnome Zeitgeist

Overview

Gnome Zeitgeist is a tool for easily browsing and finding files on your computer.

Code

The Zeitgeist code is split in two modules

• Zeitgeist GUI Gnome GUI

  • Project page: https://launchpad.net/gnome-zeitgeist

  • Repo: git clone git://gitorious.org/gnome-activity-journal/gnome-activity-journal.git

• Zeitgeist Engine comprising the core engine and data providers

  • Project page: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist

  • Trunk: bzr branch lp:zeitgeist

Some parts of the code are based on Gimmie/Mayanna

Use cases

John turns on his computer to work on his seminar paper. Instead of digging through his hierarchal file system, he simply opens up Gnome Zeitgeist and clicks on the top item in the "Recently Used Files" list. When he realizes that he can't remember the name of the website that he was reading for research yesterday, he simply looks at the list of files related to his paper and clicks on the website.

Grouping and Filtering

Our goal is to group/filter the data by:

• Type of data
• Source
• Time
• Name
• Tags
• Neighbouring Data
• Comments
• Location of use (GPS)

Features

Dataproviders:

• Gtk.RecentlyUsed (Videos, Music, Docs, etc.)

• Firefox 3 History
• Epiphany (under heavy development)
• Tomboy Notes
• Evolution (Send Mail)

Current features:

• Browse activites
• Drag and Drop (not for links)
• Tagging
• Auto tagging
• Searching
• Filtering by Dataproviders/Time/Tags
• Bookmark Data

TODO

Backend Sprints

• When importing Firefox history, automatically tag websites with firefox and/or delicious tags. (Note: It may make sense to look into integration with the Online Desktop project, which is already capable of handling account details for online services.)
• Add support for GPS filtering and mapping.
• Add logged pidgin chats into the database. (They're stored in ~/.purple/logs)
• Add Window tagging
• Add Nautilus tagging
• Add a Clipboard Dataprovider

GUI Sprints

• Show all images on any day in a thumbnail grid.
• Add an actions toolbar to quickly share items by email or instant messaging. (See nautilus-share)
• Add option of view the items of a specific time period all in one view without duplicates

Architecture

• Experiment with Tracker, Soylent, and Empathy.
• Use an RDF based backend to allow better semantic metadata. (E.g. Automatically tag files edited at a given time with the name of the Hamster project that was worked on at the same time.)

Long term goals

• Better metadata extraction (see some of the sprints above)
• Integration with other computers and mobile devices.

Video

Zeitgeist video

Bugs 20090417 Build

• Weekends are not showing with a gray column, right-mouse column is always gray

• No thumbnails for OpenDocuments; should generated easily

• Bookmarks not working with no dbus running.

City of Largo Items

The following items are required in order to provide something that we could deploy. I want to run this in the widget layer of Compiz. That would allow me to fire it off automatically when the user logs in, and hide it from their view. It would index and catch up in the background. Exposing the widget layer would have Zeitgeist immediately ready for them to use.

Required Changes

• Gconf key to disable and enable the window manager/decorator. I won't want the users to be able to exit the software. Or they will close it from the widget layer and wonder why it's not still running. Toggling the widget layer hides the UI.
• Gconf key for height, width and position of the UI. I'll set that automatically based on their current xdpyinfo. People move from resolution to resolution during the day. I'll set it automatically to sit on the bottom, and fill the whole area left to right.
• Filters button should not resize the GUI if it's made small, somehow we have to get this to fit if it's sitting on the lower panel

• Gconf key to turn off "Create New Note" (Tomboy doesn't run on same server as OpenOffice in our case) DONE

• Gconf key to turn off "Create New Document" DONE

Useful Changes

• Change "Recent" button to "Today" and use same artwork as Evolution. Icon parity is helpful to users.
• As windows gets wider, display more days. On a wide screen monitor I should be able to see 4-5 days.

• Do not allow users to go into the future with the Newer button. Impossible to have data

• Documents Firefox Images Music Other mail Notes Videos toggles should be held in Gconf keys

File Triggers/Actions

Experimental work is being done in creating popup menus for files found in Zeitgeist. The images below are the current helper bars that are used with the various file types at Largo. These have changed somewhat since my presentation last year. These cover what 99% of our users want to do with files.

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