Well after a loooooooong week on Zeitgeist here are some issues we are facing.
Engine:
At the moment the engine is very stable and very small modifications are happening (a little DB change and tagging issues). We will be exporting all Dataproviders into their own package making the engine a standalone of its own (could also ease up integration with other projects). Before GUADEC however 3 new features will be implemented:
- Timemachine: We had it in one of our first revisions but I had to take it out. Well it will be back with a respective Nautlius plugin to open an editable file form a specific timestamp.
- Predicting data related to the current activity and predicting intensity of future activities (Got that from school.
- Blacklisting data from being logged (donkey porn
)
UI:
Now this is an issue of its own. Our current Gtk UI works with the engine via DBus and we don’t intend to change that. Unlike the Engine the UI really needs some changes and concepts. We modified a lot and are facing some usability issues that David Siegel pointed out on a mail.
You need to think about how people will use it! You ask “how do you intend of viewing all your activities?” but this is an INVALID question. People aren’t interested in a view of all of their activities — only geeks and people hacking GNOME Zeitgeist are interested in that. Users only want to accomplish their objectives, not play around with G-Z and get a big overview.
I got 3 poker buddies and 2 girls from the building who are very limited computer users for a test drive:
- When they look back in time they already know what they are looking for as in what type it is, for them having so many items is pretty scary and messy making scrolling up and down very hard to find what they want.
- They would only like to view a sequence of activities when they find what they need “X” (maybe an optional timeline around an item in a new view) maybe to find someting they did while working on “X”
- They dislike the too many buttons
- only one girl and one guy were able to work with tags (sometimes i am disappointed in germans) and loved it, however tags should be easier modifiable
- one of them preferred a vertical timeline with the as in days above each other for easier scrolling another one preferred one day per per view
- all liked the searching but they thought it is stupid to view several instances on several dates (was working on it that way for later reversioing)
So concerning point 1) I tried to change the view a bit and grouped the data in it by type.
as opposed to the old view which allowed you to track the actual history of your activities.
I see the usage of both. When the rest of them team had a look at it you could see the real difference between them. Those working on documentation and filing bugs preferred the grouped one while the hackers all preferred the sequential view. Thus both have to be there but which one per default? This point is actually very important in my opinion.
NEXT WEEK:
So in 10 days I will be at UDS meeting up with RainCT (my enslaved GSoC student), David and the Do gang, to discuss further issues and release a roadmap for Zeitgeist. Really looking forward to it.
Does Time Machine (AKA, scrolling back through older revisions of documents) belong in this interface? I would think that finding a document I was working on last week versus finding a previous version of a document I worked on (or possibly deleted last week) are two distinct activities.
Also, if through this interface, I am assuming that the time machine would only refer to content and not to system states (although I would still like to be able to roll the system state back to a previous time, separate of documents, somehow…although I see that as a different activity/project again)
Regarding the grouped view vs. the sequential view, just let the users decide in some Preferences window. It’s a similar choice to what they prefer in Nautilus, icon view or list view.
Ok, I don’t know if this would really work well or not, but…
how about presenting something resembling (but not exactly like) a Gantt chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart), which each bar in the chart representing one file.
This has the effect of:
- capturing the time aspect in an intuitive way (If I worked on the file from noon yesterday to this afternoon, the bar would span that time)
- making the files I’ve worked on the most/longest more prominent
- it also captures the possibility of time-warping the file in the same interface. I don’t know exactly what the right UI for this might be, but one possibility is that when you click on the bar at a certain location, a pop-up asks if you want to edit the current version, or go back and edit the version as it was at this point in the timeline. Presumably you could zoom in to get a more precise time, with more info about the available save-points becoming legible as you zoom.
I like the grouped ui more than the sequential one, but i agree with Ami. You should have a nice and simple Display Preferences setting that switches between the two.
Also how are the groups defined ? Can you define other groups ? Can you have 1 item in more than 1 group ?
Anything that uses a tree view by default has to be questioned. Even after all these years, lots of users have problems with tree views.
@Craig
As to test i will create the timemachine as a nautilus plugin first. So no integration into the UI until we come up with a solid concept and design.
So you can imagine the scenario as follows:
Right click on item in a nautilus window and choosing properties. There you find a “Histoy” tab with the dates of modification. You can then open a uneditable version of the file from that timestamp without damaging the current.
@Fabian
Maybe a combobox above every view or day could be a good choice.
@Ami Ganguli
Again this is an appealing view but 2 problems occur: Our current (aktive) loggers dont know how long the item was opened. Maybe turning them into passive loggers could give us the option, since every application knows how it used the uri. look at this post http://seilo.geekyogre.com/2009/05/external-plugin-for-epiphany-data-pushing-into-zeitgeist/
@CoolGoose We are discussing grouping by tag, by hour and by similarity!
I’ll have to investigate this a bit. I don’t know anything about the back end, but if you know at any given time what files were opened more recently than others, then it must be possible reconstruct a more complete view over time.
Can you suggest a good entry point into the code or documentation where I an start digging a little more?
I think the grouped view isn’t a good idea: if I’m looking for an image, I would like to see only the images in every day of the list. The same for pdfs, txts,… .
When I’m looking for something, I already know the nature of the file so there should be a combo box with items like:
- visited websites
- images
- documents
- presentations
- …
- everything
If I select “everything” I get the “old view” (the third image in the post).
@Ami Ganguli
We can tell you how many times an item was used in any time period, e.g: You can say give me all acitvites from may 1st till now.
We give you a timestmaps with a repsective uris
if u count how many uris are duplicated u know how many times it was used and when
I think you need both views. There are times when I want to see my browsing history by time and when I want to see everything I did in a day. Maybe a pair of tabs, one with “By Time” and the other “By Type”? (wording to be changed if needed)
I think filters like Matteo said are a great idea, but how about in addition change the icon sizes according to the number of access and/or time opened?
Also, what is this firefox history thing in the treeview?
Does it spell “web pages accessed”?
About the view thing. I you decide on letting people choose the view in a prefs window I think that the “normal people” option should be default. Simply because “hackers” and expert users know how to change the options and probably will go through them anyway.
I really like the time machine, its a really interesting idea because people make mistakes and save them (It happens to me a lot) and there is no way to roll back to a previous version of the document. With the time machine you can roll back to the previous doc so in that way it is very useful for students and businesses.
On the new UI changes, it removes a lot of clutter.
I searched for something completely different, but found your website! And have to say thanks. Nice read. I will come back.