Seilo @ Geeky Ogre

Ketil W Aanensen wrote an AWESOME post about use cases of Zeitgeist from a non techie point of view

PLEASE READ

Zeitgeist framework 0.3 not the GNOME Activity Journal

Something that might be as a shock to some other devs is that we decided not to store annotations and bookmarks within Zeitgeist. This should be done in Tracker. Zeitgeist answers only WHEN AND HOW DATA WAS ACESSED! We store a journal of how some metadata looked like at the event  but nothing compared to Tracker since we don’t store our metadata . We will be working very closely with Tracker from now on since 0.7 has been  for a GNOME 2.30. Congrats to the Tracker Devs.

Zeitgeist 0.3 will be a development preview for the 0.9 and 1.0 version that we intend to propose for GNOME inclusion. We won’t be breaking APIs from now on unless its curcial.

Features:

• Journal of all the user activities that allows you to ask for a subjournal of any timeperiod for mimetypes, applications, subjects(docs/websites/…), events(opened, closed, focused modied and saved)
• Most Used mimetypes, applications, subjects(docs/websites/…), event types(opened, closed, focused modied and saved) in any timeperiod.
• Payloads can be stored to to each event. Just like in git and bzr where users add a note to each commit. It should be aloud to add payloads to each event, e.g: the reason the document was changed that way.
• Provide Overall Focus Lifetime of applications and documents within any timeperiod.
• (IMPLEMENTED BUT MISSING DBUS BINDINGS) Get most focused to docs/apps from docs/apps and vice verse within any timeperiods.
• (IMPLEMENTED BUT MISSING DBUS BINDINGS) Subcribe to events from the Journal.

With have a good API to support these features and I would like to suggest applications dumping their history into Zeitgeist if possible instead of maintaining their own history.
For a technical overview of the improvements over 0.2:

• stable codebase
• very clean modular architecture that allows easy improvements and maintanance
• open  for new relevancy algortihms
• better performance and more memory effcient
• clean and structured DBus API. no more weird hashes and structs
• less logging from our side since now extension for apps exists like Markus’s amazing firefox plugin that send events to zeitgeist.

We are undergoing some last bug fixes and cleanups. A release will be out soon.

After a VERY VERY VERY INTENSIVE week at the Zeitgeist hackfest we are finally back. Thank you TIS, Canonical and GNOME for making it happen. It was the first time key figures of the Zeitgeist Project (Zeitgeist framework and GNOME Activity Journal) to meet up to discuss/implement and plan together.  The amount of stuff we got done is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay beyond what we thought we could do, given our experience of only working online together. We were provided whiteboards and we made real use of them as you can see in the following pictures. TIS did a great organizing rooms, food and accomidation. Everything went very very smoothly.

The Journal team mainly consisted of Federico, Natan, Sebastian Faubel, Clemens Buss, Throsten Prante and Ketil W Aansen. The first day was spent them discussing which scope of use cases can be solved by the Journal UI and if it makes sense to actually enrich the Journal with all features of Zeitgeist or not. The Journal has been improved a lot and details as well as performance were improved. Federico and Natan will be blogging about this soon. A release is closer than u think.

The Engine team consisted of Mikkel Kamstrup, Markus Korn, Siegfried Gevatter, Alex Gabriel, Ivan Frade (thanks to Nokia) and me. Our first day was all about violating all the white-boards wit hour specs and algorithms. Ivan helped us define the scope/borders and intersections of Zeitgeist and Tracker. I will also get to this point in another blog post soonish.

The  ”Zeitgeist Resonance” implementation, a result of one month of Launchpad and Google Wave discussions, was used as a template for the development. It will be the base of all future Zeitgeist versions for the foreseeable future. It provides better scaling, easier maintenance and a very very improved API. Ivan helped finish integrating the Nepomuk and Tracker ontologies as well as develop the first app that uses Zeitgeist and Tracker simultaneously. Our Dataproviders will be extended to push into Tracker. There is still much to blog about but I think I will cut them down into several blogposts.

UDS is coming and sadly none of the Zeitgeist core devs can make it. Our only hope Markus Korn caught a flu during the Zeitgeist hackfest. However Jason Smith who was involved in the setting up of the blueprints of the soon to be released 0.3 engine will be there. He is very up to date and hopefully can answer most of the questions if he has time.

1. We are currently 5 hardcore developers: Mikkel, Siegfried, Markus, Alex and myself.
2. We all can understand as well as speak German (except for Mikkel who refuses to speak in German)
3. Currently the overall maintainers of the code are Mikkel, Markus and Siegfried. (We actually maintain our own modules but the 3 guys are much better coders leaving me with management stuff)
4. I still get to be the ass in the team.
5. Every new feature and decsision undergoes a democratic voting process (read Art of Community)
6. Alex and me consider ourselves the R&D sub-team.
7. We all are amazed by Tracker now
8. Markus is a pessimist and follows almost every sport you can think of.
9. Mikkel is a Teletubbies fan and listens to “Michael learns to Rock” .
10. Alex is a redhead.
11. I am fat. And have a crush on Ivan Frade
12. Siegfried is a jerk. We don’t leave Siegfried alone on our computers since he tends to fiddle around and install pygames.
13. We ask alot of questions: “Why?” and “The What in the Where now?” are very common.
14. “Deine Mudda (Yo Momma)” is usual reply to almost every question or statement.
15. “That’s what she said!” jokes are gaining popularity (And sometimes the occasional “he said”)
16. Siegfried and me were refered to as Bart and Homer Simpsons.
17. Siegfried is also known as “Kleiner Junge” (he is just 18)
18. We are fascinated by the N900
19. We love our new Zeitgeist engine
20. We are looking for jobs

After a long day of discussions and writing Mikkel posted the results in his post.

This is a more or less current update of our status and where we are ATM. We do have a stable functioning engine but we r working on improving it. We covered most of our use cases and now it time for cleaning it up and making Zeitgeist a beast.