Last report: Integrating Zeitgeist into GNOME Shell

["Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals (RainCT)" <rainct eurion net>]

Hey,

I'm packing to leave for two weeks, so here is my last report.

During this summer I've split Zeitgeist into two different code bases
(separating the engine -Zeitgeist- from the GTK interface -GNOME
Activity Journal-) and made them communicate over D-Bus. I also
participated in what was basically a complete rewrite of the engine
and the switch over to a new database format (together with Seif
Lotfy, Markus Korn and Mikkel Kamstrup). During this time we released
a 0.2 tarball [0] and are about to get out a 0.2.1 tarball with some
fixes, performance improvements and less dependencies.

I also familiarized myself with the GNOME Shell code and added various
Zeitgeist-based features to it, like tags [1], a related documents
section in the details pane of each application, some usage data to
the details pane, and of course I changed it to get the recently used
documents from Zeitgeist instead of from GtkRecentlyUsed [2]. All the
changes to the C part of the codebase (which are mostly for getting
the icons to display with items not coming from GtkRecentlyUsed, plus
fixing a couple bugs in OverflowList because of which the expanded
list of documents/applications didn't behave properly) are already in
master, and some changes to the JavaScript part which weren't directly
related to Zeitgeist too. I'll work on getting the remaining code [3]
merged once I'm back from holidays, and after that I already have
plans for more stuff I could add (to give just one example, the
"Recently Used" block could be changed to be configurable so that the
user can change it to show "Most used the last 7 days", "Most used
this month", "Items with one of tags X, Y or Z", etc.).

I want to use this opportunity to thank my mentor Seif Lotfy, and also
Colin Walters, Marina Zhurakhinskaya and Owen Taylor for their help
and for reviewing my changes to GNOME Shell. You all rock!

[0] https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/+download
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEH4G9p5ens
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyoD2v7QGCE
[3] http://github.com/RainCT/gnome-shell/tree/zeitgeist

Cheers,

-- 
Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals (RainCT)
Ubuntu Developer. Debian Contributor.