ZeitgeistForUNRFavorites

  • Launchpad Entry: zeitgeist-for-unr-favorites

  • Created: 2009-05-25

  • Contributors: Seif Lofty, Siegfried Gevatter

  • Packages affected: zeitgeist-core, netbook-launcher

Summary

Zeitgeist is a service which keeps track of activities on your system (file usage, browser history, etc.) and logs them into a central database. All this information is provided by external applications which communicate with the Zeitgeist daemon over D-Bus. It supports tagging, bookmarking and (in the future) automatically determining relationships between files.

We can use Zeitgeist in UNR to move to a document-centric welcome screen with recently used, popular and bookmarked items, so that users can easily find the stuff they were working on.

Release Note

This section should include a paragraph describing the end-user impact of this change. It is meant to be included in the release notes of the first release in which it is implemented. (Not all of these will actually be included in the release notes, at the release manager's discretion; but writing them is a useful exercise.)

It is mandatory.

Rationale

The Zeitgeist concept is considered to be one of the GNOME 3.0 base experience. The current Desktop is static so changing the menu is usually done manually. However with Zeitgeist the menus will be more dynamic changing the entries to suit the users preferences.

User stories

  • Jane has to leave in the middle of doing some work and switches of his computer. When she comes back, she sees the items she was working in netbook-launcher and can easily go back to them.
  • ...

Assumptions

Design

Zeitgeist-engine package to be uploaded to Ubuntu and netbook-launcher's Favorites section adapted. Said section will list recently used, most used and bookmarked applications/documents/Notes/etc..., as provided by Zeitgeist, from where the information will be fetched over D-Bus. On manual adds to the launcher Zeitgeist will be notified over DBus and adapting its database. Other options would be replacing the places menu on the left side with a more dynamic adaptable places menu. Since Zeitgeist uses the parent folders as tags, we could adapt the menu to recently active folders as well as the most used ones..

Implementation

Zeitgeist-engine package to be uploaded to Ubuntu and netbook-launcher's Favorites section adapted. Said section will list recently used, most used and bookmarked applications/documents/Notes/etc..., as provided by Zeitgeist, from where the information will be fetched over D-Bus. On manual adds to the launcher Zeitgeist will be notified over DBus and adapting its database. Other options would be replacing the places menu on the left side with a more dynamic adaptable places menu. Since Zeitgeist uses the parent folders as tags, we could adapt the menu to recently active folders as well as the most used ones.

UI Changes

Should cover changes required to the UI, or specific UI that is required to implement this

Code Changes

Code changes should include an overview of what needs to change, and in some cases even the specific details.

Migration

Include:

  • data migration, if any
  • redirects from old URLs to new ones, if any
  • how users will be pointed to the new way of doing things, if necessary.

Test/Demo Plan

It's important that we are able to test new features, and demonstrate them to users. Use this section to describe a short plan that anybody can follow that demonstrates the feature is working. This can then be used during testing, and to show off after release. Please add an entry to http://testcases.qa.ubuntu.com/Coverage/NewFeatures for tracking test coverage.

This need not be added or completed until the specification is nearing beta.

Unresolved issues

This should highlight any issues that should be addressed in further specifications, and not problems with the specification itself; since any specification with problems cannot be approved.

BoF agenda and discussion

Use this section to take notes during the BoF; if you keep it in the approved spec, use it for summarising what was discussed and note any options that were rejected.


CategorySpec

Specs/ZeitgeistForUNRFavorites (last edited 2009-05-26 10:59:55 by 80)