Now that the 0.2.1 version of the engine has been released I took the liberty to rewrite the whole UI from scratch in 4 days. Because of my f*cked up pc I enhanced performance quite a bit on the account of some memory around 20 MB (Natan will be doing his magic then) for the UI. And these are some early pics of it.
Here you have the day view:
Here you have the standard and default 3 day view:
and there is the week view:
there is a month view but you wont see any difference to the week view.
We are waiting for the OK from Kalle Persson and some testing: We are missing the bookmarks view, searching as well as browsing tags and editing them. Once done then we are almost there. I think 3 days is more than enough!
You can check it out at bzr branch lp:~gnome-zeitgeist/gnome-zeitgeist/new-interface
very impressive seilo, keep us posted
)
will it work on hardy?
Any chance of not stretching the dropdowns vertically? It looks weird and breaks some themes (I know this is no excuse).
Also, there are 4 buttons on the toolbar but only one of them has a title below it.
One suggestion: columns-in-columns makes the actual content of each pane in the multi-day views basically unreadable. I’m sure the designer folks can help you our with this.
I would think the month view should show a week at a time in columns.
Don’t get me wrong but this does not really look usable.
a) as sandy pointed out, the columns-in-columns is horrible. have a look at week view… “De…” “Do…” “Im…” what are those?
b) I am not sure the expanders really belong there
c) list-add and list-remove icons used for increase/decrease? ugh…
Overall I have a hard time trying to understand what each interface element does and what the main goal of the application is…
Agree with tom on point a and b.
If you don’t have room to show enough text, don’t show noise text.
You probably shouldn’t have to expand categories until the pane is full.
Why horizontal scrolling here? Why not just use a row for each day instead of a column?
I agree with tom on point c.
I read Planet GNOME on a regular basis, developers mention ZeitGeist from time to time, and I just don’t get what it is. The only piece of information I think i got right is that it’s a major part of GNOME 3, which should happen at 2.30.
I’m a rather long time linux user, I’ve used GNOME since KDE 4.0 (sucks hard), and even if I’m back on KDE (4.3 blew me away), I like to know what’s happening on a global scale (I read most distros’ planet, planet KDE, planet GNOME) but THIS is a friggin’ mystery to me.
What is it?
As far as looks go, it’s very clean.
But I think that grouping by higher level type is problematic.
For instance, what makes a *.py file “development” and not a program? And if your compiler uses an extension (especially for XML files) that is not recognized, why would this be classified as a document rather than development?
What makes an *.mp3 file Music and not an audio book?
If you’re creating mashups or are a graphics artist, why aren’t your creations documents instead of videos?
If you don’t get these right 99% of the time, you’ll frustrate your users who won’t know where to look for what they’re looking for.
I’m not sure what the best solution is, but I think the Sugar Journal:
http://jessicamullen.com/xxx/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/one-laptop-per-child-olpc-getting-started_-using-activities-1.jpg
is a bit closer to a usable design.
Yes it can mis-classify things through pictures, but you aren’t expanding artificially created groupings and filtering should take care of the verbosity. Plus it’s a simpler interface that’s already been field tested with children.
One more comment, if you’re going to group things by anything, grouping by “project” is much more useful. I don’t know how to do this in general, but for development, it’s pretty simple — assuming you have an IDE with the Zeitgeist hooks. For non-development applications, I’d *love* to be able to say that this power-point and this doc file and this video and this picture are part of the same project so they could be used together, packaged together, and appear associated in Zeitgeist. If some tweaks on OpenOffice and GNOME tools could be made and someone with more creativity than myself could find an easy to understand way of creating adhoc project associations (perhaps as an extension to Emblems) that would be extremely helpful and could open up several opportunities for integration between GNOME Shell (which could be used to make some windows project based), Zeitgeist (which could be used to see project activity and filter by project), and the rest of GNOME.
Well, it’s getting better and better… BUT
i really think that a event centric database and (…) should be the centric place of the desktop…
I really like this concep, and I’ve starting to study and design how we could have our desktops using Zeitgeist as a centric place.
Mayanna of course is a good aproach, but there’s something better we could do.
I have some ideas and mockus, so if yopu want to hear it… maybe something could get born.
I’m a developer, and I’m interesting on this… not really to work on the core, but to work on a new desktop experience (yep), with this as the core. Something like Mayanna, but wider.
Agreed with others that the week view (and presumably month view) are too compressed to be useful – the first two or three characters of a filename don’t really offer any useful information. And even the three-day view will have the same problem, if you have files with longer names (as your screenshot shows).
Might I suggest you consider using less precise date ranges for some of these things? If I’m looking for something I did last week, then it would be more useful to me to be able to look it up under “last week”, rather than individually looking in “August 10th” through “August 16th”
It occurs to me that a lot of the difficulties of displaying all that information efficiently would be ameliorated by a zoomable interface—the type of interface that excels at displaying and manipulating calendar-like data (see, e.g., SocialHelix). Zooming in would show more narrow ranges of time and then more specific types of data, also revealing more detail and metadata. Zooming out would slowly hide more and more detail, revising the display to be more general and appropriate for the time range being shown.
This is really pretty poor UI design, I’m afraid, not least for the reasons already stated.
Was really hoping for something that would help me *visualise* the stuff I’d been working on and its inter-relationships, not just some static, chronological, truncated-tree-ridden thing.
As a very simple example, time range selection could be done via a timeline with two sliders on it (one for start date, one for end date), with the single (not multi-column) view updating as the user moves the sliders.
I am reworking the UI at the moment but again please understadn it is just some kind of diary for your activties.
@El Ninja
I will be writing a little blog post AGAIN about the diffrence between Zeitgeist(Event Aggregation Framework), GNOME Zeitgeist(A Journal View for your activites), Tracker and Nepomuk!
@Cally
My Focus was currently on a Model View controller. And although we had some kind of get related items option we took that out for the reason of focusing on the first concept which was a journal view. (No Recently used does not do the trick)!
In our mockups we had the timeslider thingie. And I did not said its there I said its almsot there! right no I am working on a some assistive dynamic file browsing part of the journal!
Looks nice, but what is the “Lastest” version? I think translations goofed up a bit.
Take a look at the Google Docs interface for a different approach to document handling based on time. Google Docs treats files like Outlook treats emails: in a vertical list but with separators for “Today”, “Yesterday”, etc. Seems much more natural to me…
Could I ask what the GTK theme is in this shot, by the way? My first thought was Dust, but I can’t find a Dust that has dark-gray widgets (only solid black).
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