Re: Designing "Finding and Reminding"

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On 2011-05-04 at 11:15, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 10:13 PM, Federico Mena Quintero
> <federico gnome org> wrote:
> >
> > Apps which don't deal in files don't use GtkRecentManager, and *those*
> > do require changes to log to Zeitgeist directly.  Web browsers, IM
> > clients, etc.  The Zeitgeist-dataproviders are exactly this kind of
> > extensions to various apps.
> 
> What I'm saying is in the big picture the API for applications should be GTK+.
> 
> If the design calls for apps clients to "log" something, then I think
> it would make sense to have a more expansive set of "recent" than
> "files" - which might include say recent notes for GNote, or recently
> viewed web pages for a browser.

this is why the documentation for GtkRecentManager says "recently used
resources" and not "recently used files"; it's designed around URI and
not path. if it has a URI, and there is a URI handler for it, you can
store it in the list. this means: no made up stuff, like
"gedit:/path#line-number" or "tomboy:/note-uuid" unless it's a global
URI handler - i.e. you can use gnome-open with it.

> We could simply implement this as
> tomboy://note-uuid1 for example, or we could add new API like
> gtk_recent_manager_add_app_item () which will be defined to open your
> app with the URI, and not go through the MIME system.

that is already possible; it's the reason why applications have to
describe themselves when adding a new item in the recently used
resources list. the fact that everyone uses the MIME instead of one of
the applications that registered a URI in the list is just that nobody
has done it because it's easier to use the default handler for the
MIME type; but you *can* get a list of applications that opened a URI,
and you can get the timestamp when that happened, and the amount of
times that happened. this information was added to the spec exactly
because of this use case, and I think (without having seen the code)
that's something Zeitgeist has been using.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi