Re: Nautilus file browser sort by use

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Apr 22, 2008, at 8:52 PM, Christian Neumair wrote:
> El mar, 22-04-2008 a las 13:40 -0300, Ricardo Ayres Severo escribió:
> > Is there a way to sort files by access frequency?
> ...
> > I'm a programmer and am willing to write such plugin, (if the time to
> > do this is no more than a weekend, as the time is scarce here).
> > If it is possible, can you give some starting directions?
> ...
> A) Decide how this is exposed it in the GUI, maybe by talking to the
> usability guys (usability-list gnome org).

A non-obvious but very useful way to apply access frequency would be in 
sorting search results (e.g. in Tracker, if it doesn't do this 
already).

For an individual folder, I suggest:
*   In List view, there could be a "Popularity" column (off by default)
    where each item has a bar, so that the column as a whole forms a bar
    chart. (Or you could even have a sparkline area chart for each item,
    showing its popularity over time.)
*   In Icon view, the icons for the most popular items could glow, with
    the brightness of the glow being logarithmically proportional to how
    often they're accessed.
*   In the "Applications" menu, more frequently used applications could
    have the same glow.

> ...
> B) What does "frequently" mean?
>
> However this feature is implemented, it has to be decided what items
> should be preferred. I.e. some recent accesses could be preferred over
> many ancient accesses.

This could be a "Frequently used:" slider with "Recently" at one end 
and "Ever" at the other. (I don't have a good idea of where this slider 
would go, though.)

Be careful to count only human accesses, e.g. someone double-clicking 
on a file in Nautilus, or choosing a file in a filepicker. Otherwise 
something like a log file could show up as being extremely popular even 
if you'd never opened it yourself.

Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/