Re: Module Proposal: Zeitgeist

[Seif Lotfy <seif lotfy com>]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 10:24 AM, Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr> wrote:

Le mardi 17 avril 2012 à 22:47 +0200, Seif Lotfy a écrit :

> Purpose:
> Zeitgeist is an event logging framework. It stores user activity in a
> structured manner and provides a powerful DBus API to query and
> monitor the log. Zeitgeist as such does not have a graphical
> component, but is intended to integrate wherever it makes sense. Just
> like Tracker, Folks and GStreamer, Zeitgeist does not provide a UI.
> And is not a going to be used by the user directly, but rather would
> allow developers to harnest the feature it provides and make something
> useful out of it in their UX.
>
> Preamble:
> It has been 3 years and 8 month since Zeitgeist started under the
> GNOME umbrella. We proposed Zeitgeist for inclusion in 2010 but we got
> rejected due to several reasons including but not limited to:

>       * Not enough integration with GNOME applications
>       * Project hosting difficulties
You didn't say anything about the places integration to the core
desktop, i.e. the Shell and the Documents app. I think this is the key
point. What's the status of the experimental Finding and Reminding view
that was based on Zeitgeist[1] and of the Shell extension[2]? Have you
discussed with designers about that recently?

I'm all for adding Zeitgeist as a dependency, but the essential question
is (and has been since the beginning) how to make the best use of it in
the core desktop. IMHO that's where you can break the chicken-and-egg
vicious cycle.


My two cents


1:
http://people.gnome.org/~federico/news-2011-02.html#zeitgeist-in-gnome-shell
2: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/62/journal/

Hey Milan,

As far as I know the designers could not find a place for Zeitgeist in the core apps. This is the reason why I made my work as an extension so people who feel like using it can try it out easily.

There are 3 issues in discussion or in development where Zeitgeist integration is reaching a halt due to the uncertainty of where Zeitgeist stands:

• Epiphany (Web): There has long been discussions on how to deploy Zeitgeist as a backend for Web. Web needed to rethink its history problem. It ended up with developing an SQLite based history backend. Right now we are discussing replacing this backend with Zeitgeist, since Zeitgeist can do everything the SQLite backend can. plus we can add new features to Web that make use of Zeitgeist's Full-Text-Search capabilities for "searching" via the uri bar.
• Folks: I added some new properties to the individuals class in folks (currently in review). Now I could give more detail and allow the Contacts app to sort individuals by recency/frequency of interaction. The telepathy backend for this feature needs Zeitgeist. The Telepathy backend can provide even more info such as "Show me all files sent to X or recevied from X" (same goes for URIs). This feature was requested by Garrett LeSage from the GNOME Design team.
• Clocks: The clocks app is designed by the GNOME designers. It is still more or less a prototype I am working on alongside Emily Gonyer. We wanted to make use of Zeitgeist in storing "Alarms" as a type of "scheduled event", it sounds like shoehorning but it is not. I am just hesitant because I myself as a GNOME member do not want to use a technology or force integrate it without GNOME agreeing of the usage of Zeitgeist.

As I see also there is some ideas going around for the searching via Shell. I agree that every application should be able to provide it search results to shell (aggregated search). I think Zeitgeist could fit in there nicely to sort the aggregated results globally according to recency or frequency.

This is all I got honestly.

Thanks

Seif