One of the things I enjoy about Elementary Project is that is has become a meeting point for designers, hackers and engineers. Here is a nice little mockup by “chawsum” to integrate Sezen into Docky

Link to official post

This will need some hard work and hacking from the Docky side to make it possible but I hope Psyber’S can make it happen…

So at last Zeitgeist has its geolocation extension…. OH HAPPY DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What does it do?

• Nothing special. We use geoclue to add location of where an event occured in a new little table.

Why its awesome?

• It allows you to ask Zeitgeist stuff like
  • “Get me the recent files I edited at university”
  • “Who do I contact most when I am at School?”
  • “Which pictures did I take in Brazil?”
  • “Where was I when an Email came in?”
  • “What files did I open during the conference?”

A little screenshot of “El Loco”

How is that useful?

• With the ongoing trend of mobile computers and smartphones. People do a lot of stuff while they are not at home or at the office. So one always able to call, text, take photos or send/receive mails. The human brain associates these activities with when and where they happened. So this is just a little support for you memory.
• The desktop or frontpage can adapt to your location. Example: When you are at home you call Family members and when you are at work you call coworkers. So when you are one of these locations your computer or phone can adapt to your environment by populating the contact list differently.

Whats next?

• In terms or the extension me and Siegfried are still working on enriching the API and waiting for Mikkel to trash us on our shitty API. Markus is making it work on Maemo (Zeitgeist runs on Maemo) so we can start fiddling with the contact lists. Michal will have to write a C library for the extension. And Thorsten will extend the use cases and deployment ideas for this new awesome feature. Randy will implement it in GAJ.
• More preparations for GUADEC.
• But for now we have a little demo of the functionality in the form of a tiny little hack called “El Loco”.

DIRECT LINK TO VIDEO

This is by no means an application we intend to maintain, unless there is a high demand. The application is intended to be ported on Maemo and Meego.

Its been out for a while and the UI is not perfect yet but its a start. Thanks to the infamous ammonkey and the elementary team.

Here is a direct link to the video…

So at Elementary and Zeitgeist we have been trying to tackle the issue from my last blog post. Well to keep it short prototypes have been developed (and Sezen was ported to Vala). Here are 2 applet we intend to refine before we go into testing people.

Direct Link to the Video can be found here…

P.S: I tested on some friends 2 days ago, but I found this result very interesting (I will be testing more during the weekend at the city library)

Sorry C but this has to be put online…
(C who is a Mac User, wouldn’t let me put a video of her actually trying to finish this objective)

Objective: Open Movie sezen.ogv
Standard GNOME Desktop:
1. clicked desktop button several times (???)
2. applications -> Sound Video -> Movie Player
3. Movie player -> File -> Open…
4. Browsing (1 minute)

Sezen Applet with categories:
1. Click on Video on the top panel -> found it in the list
2. Out of curiosity clicked on “More…”

P.P.S: I think RainCT and mhr3  have conspired against me…

As part of the Elementary Project we are trying to find easy ways to access the documents, videos, notes, etc…

Recently I experienced second hand how painful accessing documents is while trying to get my grandmother and mother to open recent photos on my brothers computer. He also uses Ubuntu just like my mom. But he uses Do to do everything and his layout is very similar to mine (global-menu bar + docky).

Now my mom couldn’t get around much and later she called me. I told her to open the Pictures Folder. This also took a while for her to figure out where to find it. If it was the normal panel layout it would have been easier for her. However for my grandma it still would have been a pain in the ass since she doesn’t understand the concept of folders.

So lets take a simple use case. You want to access a document but don’t know where it is exactly.

————

This issue is already being tackled by Shell as seen here…

To reach this layout we need to click the following “Activities -> Desktop -> Documents”. If you ask me this looks nice but is not intuitive enough. Why should one click on “Activities” if one wants to find a document. Clicking over 3 menus is sort of “exploring to find”.

————

Then you can see here how unity does it.

Here you will have to click the (ubuntu logo -> places -> documents (if not found under All Files)). Again very simple but is this intuitive. Why would my grandmother click that logo? For me this is exploring.

Now i agree with both designs that the access should be embedded in the shell, it would be even harder for people to click and open a filebrowser (nautilus) to find their stuff. However after being put in this situation I differ in the execution of set concept.

We need to be able to say documents or music and have something on the screen that gives you quick access to them. At the elementary project we have been sturggeling to find a way to provide such experience in a well designed and good looking form. Thorsten Prante and I spent much time thinking of a way to make give access over finding. So at some point the agreed on using Sezen as a base for this and integrating it into the desktop (not nautilus) rather than having it as a standalone app.

Currently we are playing with the following designs.

and our GSoC student did this…

However we will rename Places to Library in that case. This should make things more obvious and accessible over 2 clicks “Library -> Documents”. Its not much exploring anymore as the before. The only point to be argued about is the naming, Places or Library? How can I name a button to hint me that “Documents” can be found under it?

———–

Next we have a prototype implementation of a Sezen panel that looks more like this.

It gvies you access directly to your stuff. So if you tell someone go to documents its a one click destination. Not exploring but actually u will find it by looking at the screen.

Yet maybe its not “cool” enough. And navigating through with a keyboard could be a pain in the ass.

So we tried this…

Here it seems to cluttered.

This is a case where design and usability clash. I think its more usable to have “documents”, “audio”, etc. appear in the front yet it just looks to cluttered. When trying to reduce the clutter the intuitiveness is lost and thus usability suffers.

All in all this issue has been bothering me for days now. Please join us at #elementary and #zeitgeist on freenode to discuss this issue.

P.S: I know the panel is deprecated, this is just a brainstorm.

Thorsten Prante wrote a very nice post about a sister project of zeitgeist. Its a windows application/service yet I think the community should take a good look at it since there is a lot we can learn from it. So please no trolling…

Yes Sezen supports Zeitgeist’s “Full Text Search” extension…

Here is my second take on this video I hope you guys like it, although I search for Microsoft

A direct link to the video can be found here.

What you see here is a little hint to what is coming up in Unity. A big thanks to Canonical and Mikkel Kamstrup for the FTS Zeitgeist Extension. ROCK ON!

This week I will help Randy port the functionalities to GAJ

Working with Daniel Fore and with the assistance Jason Smith and David Siegel, I started learning about how simple things can be friendlier to the eye and less can be more. This is what Sezen is all about. Again its not a tool to replace your file browser, thus no copy/paste, move, rename or delete functionality. It is just for you to try to find by searching and making use of zeitgeist.

It is a copy of what Unity is offering with its place-files with a bit more testing ground. This way we can reach a broader audience to test the usability and functionality of the concepts behind Unity for non Ubuntu users.

Here is a quick update of what it can do now and I hope you like it… Stay tuned for my next video where I will demo FTS search support

An external viewing link can be found here.

BTW: I am not a C hacker so any suggestions to add support to Nautilus can not be done by me. If you want to do add the functionality in Nautilus we have libzeitgeist and some tutorials so please contact us at #zeitgeist on irc.freenode.net

A friend of mine (Seif Sallam) wrote a nice post about his vision of a nice file manager… While its only mockups I do agree with some of his ideas. Especially the dedicated views for specific file types

http://www.seifsallam.co.cc/2010/06/how-file-manager-should-be.html

Please keeps comment on his page…

So after some intense hacking we decided to make a screencast of Sezen…

It is heavily inspired by Unity and Shell and we hope it can act as a usability testing app until the both are out…

Just like Unity, it uses Zeitgeist and follows similar design concepts (thanks to David Siegel). It started evolving more after some intense hack + design sessions with DanRabbit (Elementary Project) + Jason Smith (Docky)

Here is an external viewing link

We do however intend to have a Tracker version of it upon release for benchmarking issues (As a side note we have a Zeitgeist extension that pushes into a custom Tracker branch that supports our “Zeitgeist Event Ontology” thanks to Codethink).

Upon release there will be support for FTS using the new Canonical sponsored FTS extension. The user will be able to choose to do so over our new Zeitgeist FTS extension or Tracker for the functionality.

We will host a sezen deb soon on the elementary ppa so stay tuned…

NOTE:

I WONT ADD LISTVIEWS… ITS JUST A SEXY SIMPLE SEARCH TOOL.