Out of personal and convenience issues i decided not to board the train today.
So I wont attend FOSDEM. However 2 Zeitgeisters will be there.
Please don’t hesitate to contact Hylke Bons (hbons) concerning the GNOME Activity Journal and Siegfried Gevatter (RainCT) concerning Zeitgeist Framework!
Have fun! And lay off the booze!

With Codethink sponsoring the prize for the upcoming to be announced competition for the coolest app using Tracker and RDF, I took the liberty to sum up the “fuss” around Tracker in 2 blog posts.

• Part I: User Stories and Problems of the current desktop.
• Part II: Tracker To The Rescue and Providing New User Experience

So here we go with Part I:

User stories:

• Tony is making some changes to a document. To clarify some issues, he wants to refer back to the email threads or IM conversations he’s had about that document.
• Jenna uploaded her vacation pictures from Brazil to her desktop. She would like to tag people in the picture with contacts in her address book. Later when she uploads the pictures to Flickr she expects to have the tags available there too.
• John has to work on his Michael Jackson research. Since he worked using webapps such as “Google docs” and some local data, he needs to be able to globally search for all his data on the web and locally.
• Rob is trying to land a contract with ACME Inc. he wants to get a list of all of his contacts who have a relationship to ACME Inc.
• Tony met a hot girl at a house party. He wants to search which of his freinds know her.
• April is working on a project. She wants to make a ‘folder’ containing all the research materials she’s using on the project. Her research materials include webpages, downloaded files, e-books, emails and IMs.

Problem:

After a some dirty hacks and little battle with dependencies. The Zeitgeist team got the engine running on Maemo…

Now for the UI and some Zeitgeist voodoo

BTW if u have any N900 to throw or donate at the Zeigeist developers side please contact us on irc.freenode.net #zeitgeist.

Thanks to the Zeitgeist Project Team we have 2 good news today

GNOME Activity Journal 0.3.2 – Luciana’s Tricycle

On behalf of the Zeitgeist Project team, after 1 year, 3 months, and 9 days since the first prototype, I am proud to announce the first development release of GNOME Activity Journal, codenamed “Luciana’s Tricycle”.

What is GNOME Activity Journal?

GNOME Activity Journal is not a File Browser but an Activity Browser. It uses the Zeitgeist Framework to display what you did, and introduces a better way to quickly find the things you were doing.

Where?

Downloads: http://edge.launchpad.net/gnome-activity-journal/0.3/0.3.2/+download/gnome-activity-journal-0.3.2.tar.gz
About Zeitgeist: http://zeitgeist-project.com
Wiki: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeActivityJournal

Features:

• Pretty layout
• Pinning (marking) items
• Calendar slider (quickly move forwards/back in time)
• Preview tooltips

Experimental:

• Tracker-based search

Features in progress for future releases:

• Display web browsing history in the journal
• Search and interaction
• Tags
• Detailed single-day view showing relationships between files
• Removing activities from the journal

Call for translators:

The project is still very low on translations. We’d really appreciate translation contributions so more people will be able to start using Zeitgeist.

Cheers
Seif Lotfy

————————————————————————————————

Zeitgeist 0.3.2 – Shadowy Rumble

On behalf of the Zeitgeist Project team, I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Zeitgeist 0.3.2. This is the third development release, leading up to what will be our stable 0.4 series. It introduces bug fixes and other performance optimizations to work with GNOME Activity Journal.

What is Zeitgeist?

Zeitgeist is an event-logging framework for desktop and mobile devices. Applications can push events into the log, and anyone can query the log via the rich query API. The logged events are semantically categorized and can come from any sort of activity, such as file usage, communications, and browsing history, etc. The Zeitgeist engine is a user-level service and does not have a GUI. It is intended to support dedicated journaling applications aand deep integration with other desktop components.

Where?

Downloads: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/+download

About Zeitgeist: http://zeitgeist-project.com

Wiki: http://live.gnome.org/Zeitgeist

News since 0.3.1

• Added FindEvents, optimized shorthand for GetEvents(FindEventIds(…)).
• Fixed DeleteEvents and make it ignore bad requests.
• Fixed GetEvents not to raise an exception when called with an empty list.
• ZeitgeistClient.get_version() now returns a Python list.
• Some code refactoring, documentation changes and other little fixes.

Cheers,

Seif Lotfy

so its not only mockups…

Hylke and Randy are now part of the Zeitgeist Family taking the lead in the development of GAJ with help of the Zeitgeist Framework developers. Ladies and gentlemen please enjoy…

Kalle Persson said “A mockup is worth a thousand lines of code”

I fully agree! Thanks to Hylke’s mockup and guidance during the development of it, things started becoming more reality.

Randal Barlow hacked the little calendar on the bottom and the rounded corners. The Zeitgeist Engine team jumped in to fix bugs. Apoorca Sharma fixed some theme issues we had. Collabora finished “Teamgeist” which will be implemented in the UI and Codethink are helping us with the Tracker integration. Ahhhhhh I love you all

Here is the mockup

Here the implementation (missing the month labels) that took us around a week…

*UPDATE: Randal finished the calendar! With some minor adjustments we now have….

We are trying to implement rounded corners with pygtk. The only solution way to do it is to use cairo afaik. Can some1 help us out with that. Code snippets would be awesome. We need it for the day headers. Also u might like to help us hack the calendar as seen on the mockups from the previous post. Cheers

Hylke Bons mocked up

Together we did…

While its not done yet I think we r getting there…. This is the current real app btw. Federico is hacking the calendar… Then we are off for a nice release…

What do you think?

*UPDATE: Now it (halfway) adapts to the theme and I tried to manipulate the expander buttons. You can get the code from lp:gnome-activity-journal

So after some cleanup we decided to upload these pics before new years starts. Development is going very fast thanks to the Zeitgeist Framework 0.3 series. This is not our final design and there are ofcourse some usability flaws. We welcome critics, praises and suggestions.

Here is the default layout.

You can group specific file types to not get into your way…

Here you see the second view (list view). One can change both views using the buttons in the toolbar.

One can also show the times by enabling the “Show Time” checkbox on the bottom right.

So this is all for now. To run it you need the latest zeitgeist from

bzr branch lp:zeitgeist

cd zeitgeist

./autogen.sh

make

sudo make install

Then you will need the gnome activity journal

bzr branch lp:gnome-activity-journal

cd gnome-activity-journal

./gnome-activity-journal

There is still a bunch of things missing like

• Bookmarking and tagging
• Searching
• Calendar
• Interactions with the items
• Enable websites support

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE

This is a quick status report of the GNOME Activity Journal and its future development.
After a very stressful hackfest and a newly developed engine. We now how a new UI. It is still not there but I hope you like it for now.

The video sound is somehow delayed (not my fault) plus the loud sounds are the sounds of Cairo (Egypt).
Here is the Todo list for a release please drop by to help if u want to. I think 2 weeks from now we should be done.

1) Add Calendar Widget
2) Add Bookmarking (Tracker)
3) Add Tagging (Tracker)
4) Add Searching (Tracker + Zeitgeist)
#5) Enable Collaboration Mode (Teamgeist)
6) Add open/open folder/most used with (Zeitgeist)
7) Extract properties (Tracker)
Enable Event View
9) Clean up code
10) Monitor memory consumption
11) Enable Website handling (Zeitgeist)

Cheers
Sef