So with an awesome GNOME 3.0 out I already had some stuff prepared for 3.2 that can show off some of the power and awesomeness Zeitgeist could provide for GNOME 3.2
The designs are random till now and we (Federico, Siegfried and me) are waiting for directions. Until then we are doing what we think somehow makes sense for new GNOME 3.2 features.
So things we have cooking are:
Jump-lists:
Search:
Journal:
This is all working code and here is a video to prove it.
None of these things are final yet so feel free to criticize. We have all the pieces we need so it is up to the design team to come up with a final design so we can implement it (sponsored by Collabora). I will be sending a mail to the mailing list soon.
Happy hacking everybody and congratulations for the GNOME 3.0 release…
Great work.
About “Library”:
Personally, I prefer a “History” section. On this section, we can have a time-line to see all what the user was doing. (Files open, Web pages see, talks with IM contacts, etc). And on in left, choose between “Today”, “Yesterday”, “week”, “month”, etc….
Please be a bit more user friendly and for GNOME 3.2 please add to both left favorites sidebar and right virtual desktops option(trough right-click menu) to show on desktop. They should be not available only in activities dash, but also on normal desktop if user wants it also with option to autohide…
Very nice
Are there plans for a timeline view of our document history?
Also, I hope that somewhere in GNOME Shell the size of those icons is configurable
When I’m browsing, I like to get a good overview of what I have, with many files shown, rather than having to scroll and having most of my content invisible to me. 
Thanks for chugging along. I’m eagre to find you in GNOME 3.2.
Very, very nice. This is seriously great work. AFAIC Gnome Shell is already superior to Canonical’s Unity, and with this Zeitgeist work in 3.2, Gnome Shell will be a perfect experience
Cool! Final design might be tweaked a bit and more intergrated but this is a great start.
The js mime-type icon looks ugly though but I reported that mime-type thing in Ubuntu years ago and it didn’t change…
Great work. Whatever features you add, please be sure to honor the design & methodology of Gnome 3.
Nice to see the progress on the Zeitgeist front! Keep up the good work.
Here some points:
- “Windows Applications Library” are unfortunate names. It is really hard to guess from the names what it actually behind them. Especially for newbies. I suggest to use “History” instead of “Library” since it is all about files that have been saved, opened, edited, played,… in the past.
- Please include the equivalent of Firefoxs “Private browsing” in this framework. If a user, for whatever reason, does not want to have some activities registered/recorded/show up in his history this should be easily possible. I suggest a button “not register activities” that makes it easy to temporarily disable to be registered by this service.
Looks awesome.
Small tip for future screen-casts: choose less unfortunate names for your movies. Some people might get the wrong impression that those aren’t just trailers.
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One thing I’d like to see (and not sure if it belongs to Zeitgeist) is something which tracks which applications you often run and automatically show them in the favourites section. Possibly make them a bit different from the manually put applications, but at least show them. No idea if that is according to some design. Just something I think would be nice.
@ovitters this is very much zeitgeist domain and canonical uses it for unity. It is a few lines of code
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Finally the Recent Documents list got fixed.
Library is sorted by time, so documents move to different positions after days passes. This is not how a real world library works: documents stay on the same shelf day after day unless they are moved to a different shelf and position. So maybe Library is not a good name for that. Even notes on Calendars don’t move.
A couple of questions.
Is there any plan to add a fourth tab (Folders) to quickly access the real location of documents?
Are we going to have Library in the Save and Save As dialogs? Probably not because we’re always saving to Today. That means that saving and opening are made using two different paradigms: positional and temporal. We already have the Recent Documents list but being so short (10 documents) it’s not very usable right now (any real document goes off the list after listening to 10 MP3s) so I guess that everybody uses a positional paradigm to open documents 99.9% of times. Making a time based one the most prominent one is a very big change and a very big split between saving and opening. I wonder if people could forget where they should save a document or start saving everything to the Documents folder, without any folder substructure.
Another point:
In many cases, one short line of text will not be enough to identify specific files. The current layout does neither use tooltips nor displays the whole filenames. Filenames are just truncated if they are too long. This will be very problematic for the usability of the shown UI.
Their is a bug open for this type of behaviour on gnome-shell: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636655
Perhaps the Zeitgeist developer should get in contact with Gnome-Shell developers to discuss possible solutions?
+1 for a ‘Timeline’ right to the ‘Library’ section to include the well known GNOME Activity Journal view (i.e. http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/5377/zeitgeist.png)
A powerful document search-engine is a part that Gnome3 really lacks. A NEW Desktop-Environment without such a function is no more acceptable (sorry, but I must say so…)
Some questions:
Does the document search shown above consider the content of the documents or only the title? – if it does, what file-types are supported? (at least local files: txt, openofffice-formats, pdf, evoloution-mail, tomboy-notes – next level: integrate external sources like google-docs etc.)
[...] Zeitgeist work towards GNOME 3.2 [...]
Wow, you almost did it.
Could you guys implement file browser too ?
Windows-Applications-Library/History-Browser
Clicking twice left mouse button on the file(for applications would be good too) won’t close the shell, but will open file under the shell(behaviour the same as its already opened). This will allow to browser more effective.
This would help alot.
Similarly to what Paolo has already written, I miss the “Places” menu in Gnome3. Currently, there is not replacement and I am looking forward to Zeitgeist.
However, please do not forget that for many (professional) people, it is crucial to easily access the real folders. Gnome2 was a genious in this regard. The “Places” menu was simple, easily to understand and also fast accessible. I always had my most important folders in there as bookmarks. Very fast access! Please provide something similar again!!! Thank you.
I’m very impressed with Gnome Shell. I’ve spent a little time playing with 3.1.4 in Ubuntu Oneiric and it’s really quite fast, smooth and easy going. My primary focus is on Unity, but I have no problems recommending Gnome Shell. What I do hope is that Unity and Gnome Shell stores data in Zeitgeist in the same way so that it’s possible to switch between them without getting different search results and history. It would be really cool if we could get an application to switch between them live, without logging out and in a smooth way. What can be compatible, should be compatible. It would be interesting to see if and how Gnome Shell could handle Indicators. If it could be done without disrupting or breaking the Gnome Shell design, then I think that would be very nice addition.
In any case, congratulations to the Gnome Shell team. This is really awesome work!
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