Re: Module Proposal: GNOME Activity Journal

[Randy B <email tehk gmail com>]

This is just a quick note. People often confuse Zeitgeist with the
Activity Journal. The Journal is a centralized activity browser that
uses Zeitgeist. Other implementations around the GNOME desktop will
use Zeitgeist directly unless they just want to just display a
specific day in the journal or information about a specific event.
Something like tracker-search-tool mixed with Nautilus, except for
activities instead of files.

> What are your long term user interface goals?
We plan to finish tracker search support and add both a tracker tag
cloud and a way to view a detailed description of an event. Beyond
that, we would like to further refine the existing interface.

> Do you see the
> modification to the GNOME 2 UI being a new "Activity Journal" entry in
> "Accessories" as being the end?
I plan to merge a branch soon which provides a DBus interface to
display specific day, or a specific event which could be used by other
applications. Other than the possibility of applications using that
interface Activity Journal will just be another application which
exist in the menu.

> * Do you expect users to launch this occasionally when they're looking
> for something, or they keep it running?
Users would launch it just as they would a file manager, which is to
say, when they are looking for an activity.

> * Have you given any thought to how this interacts with the file
> picker, Nautilus, or the Places menu in GNOME 2?
Journal should have almost nothing to do with those applications. If
Zeitgeist features were added to those applications they could
possibly have a option to launch the journal and show more information
about the event or the day's activities using the aforementioned
planned DBus interface.

> * Have you looked at the GNOME 3 UI plans around files?
I have seen the ThreePointZero plan wiki page, and the Activity
Journal's goals are exactly what is defined there under the "Changing
the way we access documents" section. Once we finish the tracker
search and tag cloud, I believe we will be close to providing a part
of that user experience. Zeitgeist and tracker integration in other
key modules is really needed to provided that experience throughout
the GNOME desktop.