Gnome-Shell - Activity Journal [GSoC Project]

[Akshay Gupta <kitallis gmail com>]

Hi,
I'm a GSoC student for GNOME this year and I'll be working on http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/kitallis/1 this summer. I thought I'd run down the major discussion points by all of you and also get fair idea of the design decisions. I'll just be covering the Shell tasks for the moment.

In a nutshell, this is basically about the Zeigeist activity journal on Gnome-Shell Seif, Federico and I have been working on. Zeigeist is an activity logger, that indexes user actions like opening files, visting websites and IM conversations etc. So, we're pretty much trying to integrate all this logging in a nice seamless overlay in the Shell[3], basing it around the Gnome Activity Journal[1].
Most of the work and the ideas below are based around this non-finalised draft http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/FindingAndReminding

. As the journal described above would need a nice searching capability, Federico and I decided upon a Firefox-like highlight based search, that'd essentially, highlight the matched events instead of the traditional remove the non-matches search. This is a significantly faster way of searching as it doesn't actually change the built Journal state but retains the rest of the events along with clear view of the matched results[2].
. Starring/Pinning is also another cool GAJ feature that allows favoriting certain event items. A star button (like close on Windows) on the top-right corner could be used as a mouse-hover event. We're not exactly sure, where this will be accessible. Two possible things - either push it inside the the favorites Dash on the left or just be available as a filterable item on the right, or both. Please take a look at [3].  
. The eraser mode should serve as a quick and easy way to just pull out items off of that Journal by clicking on it once, this mode would be just the regular journal replaced to account for these specific removal features. The currently planned features are one-click removal (like closing windows from the overview), multi-selection removal.
. The filters are pretty much completing the work in Seif's branch.

We'd like to have interested designers to come forward and give inputs for these and also reviews on stuff that's already been done (preferably on the ML itself, although i'd be logging #gnome-design anyway).
Please follow these to become more clear on what's already been done and the possible scope inside it:
1. http://seilo.geekyogre.com/2011/04/zeitgeist-work-towards-gnome-3-2/
2. I wrote a basic working prototype of the model in [4]; You can look at an awesome video describing it here: http://ompldr.org/vOGRoMw (use VLC!)

Other standalone tasks. Because Seif and co. will already be working on 
the Journal, I've tried covering as much separate tasks as possible 
above. Although we're open to any changes in the FindingAndReminding 
draft (and/or the above) which can be implemented explicitly because I'd
 like stuff to be as non-experimental as possible.

[1] http://live.gnome.org/Zeitgeist/UseCases | http://live.gnome.org/GnomeActivityJournal
[2] http://ompldr.org/vOGhjNg
[3] http://seilo.geekyogre.com/uploads/2011/04/Screenshot-81-1024x640.png
[4] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/FindingAndReminding#Proposal


-- 
4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42
Akshay Gupta (kitallis on IRC and elsewhere)