Shane Fagan » Gnome-Zeitgeist

Nautilus

Shane — Sat, 30 May 2009 02:21:56 +0000

Nautilus its something linux users (who use Gnome desktop) use every day. Ive started thinking about ways Nautilus can be made better since the announcement of Gnome 3.0 because its so integral to Gnome. I like it but there are a few things that I dislike.
Here are my ideas.
If the folder is large for instance /usr/bin it takes about 20-30 seconds to load that folder on my computer (If you want to know the spec its in a previous post)
I think thats a little bad, to be honest I dont know how you could fix it but I think it should be a lot better.
In vista (I know its shite) windows explorer has a tag editor for songs. So you can edit the track info like the album, title, artist etc. Nautilus doesnt have this and it would be nice to have it.
The backgrounds and emblems thing also needs some added functionality the lack of options at the moment makes it quite useless. Maybe a better colour selector would make it a little nicer. The colour wheel like in the appearance preferences wizard would work a lot better.
Better integration would be good too. If you look at evolution (I know its UI is soo ugly) in the bottom left hand corner you can make a note view the calender etc maybe add that bar to nautilus so you can access your email etc easily.
These are just a few ideas I have some crazy ones. Like playing videos and music inside of nautilus. I know it sounds crazy but I think we have to think outside the box to make Gnome really useful and easy to use.

Zeitgeist (Which I blogged about previously) will have some functionally to add to Nautilus, bookmarking of files and file tagging (Not like what I was complaining about above, this is just to aid in searching etc to be used in Zeitgeist itself) are what will probably be added by Zeitgeist.

Im not a developer of nautilus but id be happy to discuss it with them and maybe help if they want to implement any of the ideas.

Please comment with what you think.

Shane_Fagan

Gnome-Zeitgeist

Shane — Sun, 10 May 2009 23:20:44 +0000

Ive started contributing on gnome-zeitgeist so I decided that ill explain it.
Firstly here is the url http://zeitgeist.geekyogre.com/
and on the gnome website http://live.gnome.org/GnomeZeitgeist
And finally on Seif Lotfy’s website http://seilo.geekyogre.com
and on launchpad https://launchpad.net/gnome-zeitgeist
In a nutshell zeitgeist journals the users workload as a log of what you have done over the past few days.
So if you looked at a video, listened to a song, looked at a document zeitgeist will journal it.
Its useful if you didnt finish something, you can go back to it the next day or a few days after.
Also you can also tag and bookmark your activities, to help you find them later.
We are currently making plugins for rhythmbox, banshee and pidgin as well as fine tuning the UI.
In the future it will be integrated into Gnome-Shell and hopefully will be included in Gnome 3.0.
If you want to help drop into #gnome-zeitgeist on gimpNet.
You can grab the current development version of zeitgeist with
“bzr branch lp:gnome-zeitgeist” (Without the quotes using bazaar)

Gnome 3.0

Shane — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:07:32 +0000

I recently heard that gnome are informally planing the 3.0 release. Before I start I just want to say I love gnome. KDE is nice but gnome is just stable and very easy to use.
My ideas are:
1. Making a gnome media player like ITunes or windows media player. I know that totem satisfies this slightly but the lack of a library makes it a little irritating to play songs. Maybe just merge rhythmbox and totem.
2. Implementing file/folder tags in nautilus.
3. Make it easier to access files without using nautilus. Searching through folders for files using nautilus is slow. We can make it easier.
4. Shaking up the desktop look. Better themes, nicer effects. Stuff that makes the desktop user go wow. (kde focused on a fresh cool look for 4.0 and we should do the same for gnome 3.0) Ubuntu netbook remix is a good example of an easy to use good looking interface.
5. Finding new things to do with the workplace switcher. At the moment its just good for organisation. Different desktop backrounds maybe to help differentiate. Different workplaces can do different things like one for office, one for internet programs like firefox but making it easy to control different processes on different workspaces is what I want.
6. Web services integration. I previously blogged about using the deskbar applet to update my twitter. We can do a lot more. Maybe writing new blog posts, getting people’s twits delivered to the desktop etc.
7. An overhaul of evolution. This is a big one for me. Evolution is the default email client and it is quite poor in terms of UI and usability. Examples of this are clear when writing a new email and you right click to paste in something and it doesn’t work. Maybe have evolution dropping into the notification area would be nice. The dictionary is also not very good when one compares it to firefox. Evolution just simply doesn’t compare to the other email clients on the market.

These are just a few ideas we definitely can do better. I think that windows 7 and probably future versions of windows wont be able to keep up if we can keep up with the newest trends. Computing is slowly moving to a more web based environment, gnome can adapt to this change positively and blur the lines between desktop and the web (clouds too)

Update: I did some googling and I found a plan for gnome 3.0
http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/Plan

Update 2: Gnome-shell is very interesting and it fixes some of what I was complaining about. It makes multiple workspaces useful but it may make things slightly complicated. That solves Point 5.
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell
Also gnome-Zeitgeist solves Points 2 and 3.
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeZeitgeist