Re: [Tracker] A simplified tracker idea

[Ivan Frade <ivan frade gmail com>]

Hi!

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 1:02 PM, Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com> wrote:

On 07/01/10 03:55, Yuan Yijun wrote:

want to have tracker turned on and usable? I just installed tracker,
could you tell me how to maximize its use?

I would say the most visible ways of using it right now are:

 tracker-search-bar
 (the applet to quickly find your information)

 tracker-search-tool
 (this is being improved right now but is a bit lacking in features)

 nautilus
 (for tagging files)

 GtkFileChooser
 (for finding your files quickly when you need to choose one)

 Totem
 (for finding all videos/audios)

 

Any brave hacker is more than welcome to write small & highly valuable extensions here and there to improve the situation. My usual examples include:

1) a plugin for EOG to mark the people visible in a picture
2) Improve the location-plugin of EOG to save its information into tracker
3) A tagging widget ("rishi" in IRC is working on that... but somebody could "steal" the epiphany-browser widget...)
4) Include the tagging widget in another EOG extension -> You can tag pictures in EOG or nautilus (thanks to rishi extension) and the data is shared!

It is not an obsession with EOG: it has a plugin interface in python and is a fairly small program, so you can make useful things with simple code.

For more ambitious hackers, what about...
1) F-Spot saving/retrieving information from tracker
2) Rythmbox using tracker for the usual views
   2.1) Intelligent playlists as "recently played songs", "more played songs"
   2.2) Write a plugin for totem so you can have playlists by contact (all songs sent by contact ... X) [depends on 4.2]
4) Plugins for your prefered IM client to save...
  4.1) conversations in tracker
  4.2) file transfers (contact x sent me file y)
  4.3) show pictures where the contact is present (depending on the EOG extension!)
5) Tag browsing tab in nautilus (again, "rishi" is working on that, AFAIK)

This is only the beggining. I am not going to talk about "usage counters" or mark related documents in a nautilus extension... All these small details in the desktop add a lot of value for the user experience, and are implementable now that we have tracker.

I hope these examples show where are we heading to: the main value is in linking information from different sources and not in the plain text search (which is an extremely good side-effect).

Regards,

Ivan