GSoC 2011 - 0

This is part zero of my milestone log for GSoC.

A major section of my project this year is about creating the much hyped and discussed Journal for Gnome-Shell. A neat automatic history-logger powered by Zeitgeist. My proposal can be found here.

a priori
Seif has worked a lot over the Shell in the past two months or so. It looked in a pretty promising state when I first got my hands on it.
Here's what it can do right now (from Seif's blog):
1. Library - Adds a new tab in the Shell's overview and displays all the events with the icon thumbnails sorted and mapped into appropriate time-buckets.
2. Search - Extends the search to incorporate Zeitgeist-indexed events.
3. Filter - According to pre-defined categories and access-types.

Some of my experiments can be seen in this video -



google summer of code
Here are a few mockups of how a few of the new features mentioned in my proposal will span out over the next two/three weeks.

Main view of the Big fat eraser mode  -























I-search -





















Optimize - The aggregation is a bit sluggish at the moment. The icon-grid generation needs to be sped up by proper caching. Other possible optimizations need to be figured out.

These are basic mockups of what we think should be appropriate, so suggestions and critiques are welcome. Federico and I decided that building this should be as crowd-sourced (design-wise) as possible, so I will be maintaining this Journal as an extension as well as a separate branch.

scope
This project solves a very common, everyday problem. It tries to let you have an easy way to access your working set of files and other items into a single space. From Desktop-like accessibilty to Places and File Manager navigation. Our aim is to get it up and ready for release with 3.2. I'd strongly suggest reading this article, if you haven't already - https://people.gnome.org/~federico/news-2011-05.html#narrative for what we've planned for ahead.