Here are some new pictures of the current in devlopment GNOME Activity Journal (GNOME Zeitgeist)
Still more to happen and more little design flaws to be removed.
Some pics from the new GNOME Activity Journal
September 16th, 2009 by Seif Lotfy Leave a reply »
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Zeitgeist looks quite interesting, and it’s a quite novel way to navigate. Is it actually the intention that Zeitgeist is complementary to the traditional way of browsing and navigating, or would it replace it?
I’m curious as to how viable it is for actual use: are you guys dogfooding it? How have your experiences as a user up been till now?
@nona Right now we are testing around! Today I actually tried to not use the traditional File Browser. Beside some minor bugs it was actually much faster
especially since usually u have kind of a workflow that has its traces somewhere withing the last 3 days or today. We don’t intend to replace but rather to extend or compliment the experience of traditional browsing and navigating.
BTW Zeitgeist is a backend (engine) while the UI is now called GNOME Activity Journal
Sounds good, thanks. I’m curious to try it out.
Hmmm, although it looks kind of straight forward, I cannot say I would want to use this. My thought is “this is all well and good, but it doesn’t actually tell me anything I would want to know”.
“Activities” to me has nothing to do with which particular files I opened, but rather what project I am working on. I couldn’t give a damn about the last 753 songs I listened to, but I might want to know which files in my project I screwed with. For instance, say I am writing a program or something for a client, and I want to know all the stuff I worked on in regards to that project for the last week.
Also, there is all sorts of the important stuff missing here, how about which bugs I filed, or which tasks I completed or created.
Another thing, back when I worked for someone else, my boss would periodically come by and ask to be shown what I was doing with my time, and to be honest, there was times I had just been surfing the web when I was supposed to be doing my job and just maybe I might want to lie through my teeth rather than admit it (small and petty? yes, and I suspect most of us are guilty of this at some point or another). It might be nice if the damn activity journal didn’t give me away; point being, I would like it if there was a way to filter which activities are recorded, and I don’t see this here.
I don’t understand, is this program to know the things that I do in the past days?
If I want see a new video, have I to use Nautilus or I can search it with this program?
My best congrats for this wonderful work!!!
When this will be ready we’ll be well ahead of Windows 7 and even OS X, for sure!
THANKS GUYS!!!
PS: Estimated release date? Will this be included in preview in Ubuntu 9.10?
Very nice stuff you have here.
I have one observation though: *if* the left/right arrow buttons on the top left are used to navigate through the days, please consider using a horizontal scrollbar or some other widget.
Left/right arrow buttons used for the purpose of scrolling other elements are not a good idea. Recall for instance the arrows present in the the Beagle search tool UI. They are a bad idea since the require the user to move the cursor above the right button every time they have to go back/forward (having also to look at the position of the cursor to check that its hovering on the right button, very distracting), plus they don’t support automatic repeat (while held down) by default.
In the long run all this gets incredibly annoying, especially if no accelerators are specified to accomplish the same task (especially for people who dont like/dont know how to use keyboard shortcuts.)
Just my 2 cents.
@Ted:
- Showing only specific events: That’s what filters are there for.
- Don’t save everything: I think that is somewhere on the TODO list
- Stuff Missing: There is a dbus api. So if there’s an app not providing events, get the project to report them to Zeitgeist.
@Stefano:
I think the problem with that is: There is an unlimited number of days. Have you had a look at calendar apps? Evolution, Sunbird, Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal they all use arrow buttons. I have yet to see the calendar app implementing a horizontal scrollbar. I think the way this is solved mostly with a GtkCalendar widget or it’s counterparts. The Journal had one once. We will keep this in mind.
Looks very interesting! can’t wait to try it =)
Hey, how’s the KDE version of this???
This is starting to look very nice indeed! Where can I get the code, launchpad? (if so, which branch so I can try it
)
Also, say my application is interested in the data stored in the zeitgeist backend… is there any documentation around on how I can interface with it?
@Alberto If you just downloaded the video you will find it in the current day under video
. You can also search for it in the UI.
@alf
We already started using the Nepomuk ontology in the engine allowing KDE developers to start hacking on a UI for KDE too.
@haTem
You can get the code from “bzr branch lp:~gnome-zeitgeist/gnome-zeitgeist/new-interface”.
To get it running you will need to install the zeitgeist engine. “bzr branch lp:zeitgeist”
You can find a little API tutorial here from one of the core developers here http://bloc.eurion.net/archives/2009/zeitgeist-api-02/
@Stefano by tonight there will be the option to choose how many days you want to view or u can set up a custom period with 2 calendars. Or jump to a week or a day using the calendar. So no worries we will put it in again!
Is this thing smart enough to not list my porn? =)
Well hello, just wanted to say thanks for your work, what I’ve seen so far looks great and I really believe that it will change and improve my workflow and stuff.
Whenn it’ll be copied over to Windows 9 or something, you’ll know you really had a good idea.
@einalex: I think a scroll bar ala OO.o Calc would be great: it could let you to scroll the last 7 days, if you release it on the 7th day then it shrinks and lets you to scroll the last 14 days and so on.
I have to say, as an ‘ordinary user’, this looks way scarier and clunkier than just using ‘find files’. I can’t even read half of those filenames, they’re truncated too badly and many of them are very simliar (screenshot-blah).
And do I really have to look at things a day at a time? Can’t I look at a whole week, or a whole month, at once?
Stefano said :
“I have one observation though: *if* the left/right arrow buttons on the top left are used to navigate through the days, please consider using a horizontal scrollbar or some other widget.”
Maybe left/right arrow buttons could be contextualised : i.e. display left arrow at the top left side of Monday panel (on the 1st screenshot) and the right arrow on the top right side of wednesday panel ?
@einalex
Regarding the scrollbar: Why not use a system like F-Spot? They have a scrollbar that also act as a histogram showing the number of items at each date.
Also, it would be good to experiment with vertical views for the main pane. Imagine this as a list of emails in your favorite program. Each day is separated by a header. And there is plenty of horizontal space for the activity descriptions, text, metadata, etc. Also, scrolling is much easier in the vertical direction. An infinite-scrolling system that loads older activities as you scroll down would be perfect.
I see this as needless feature bloat that eats up cpu, memory, and hard drive resources, and I would hope that this would not be part of the default Gnome install.
If this is going to be tied into the desktop so tightly that it’s going to be almost impossible to remove it, I’ll be looking for a lighter desktop environment.
This is coming from a long-time Gnome user. I chose Gnome over KDE because it was lighter. If Gnome is going to go down the same path as KDE, then I’ll find something else.
Stefano said :
"I have one observatiin though: *if* the left/right arrow buttons on the top left are used to navigate through the days, please consider using a horizontal scrollbar or some otger widget."
Maybe left/right arrow buttons could be contextualised : i.e. display left arrow at the top left side of Monday panel (on the 1st screenshot) and the right arrow on the top right side of wednesday panel ?;
It looks interesting but what I like to see in GNOME 3.0 is K3b and KMail version for GNOME
.
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