Geolocalized Tasks Plugin

What is Getting Things Gnome! ?

Getting Things Gnome! (GTG) is an organizer for the GNOME desktop environment, focusing on usability and ease of use. GTG manages your to-do items easily, complete with tags and nested subtasks.

Using GTG is easy: You can create new "Tasks", to organize what you have to do. Sometimes, you need to finish something first before being able to accomplish your task. For that, we have "Subtasks". The purpose of subtasks is to cut down a task in smaller subtasks that are easier to achieve and to track down.

You can use "tags", to sort your tasks. A tag is a simple word that begins with "@".

If you press the "Work View" button, only actionable tasks will be displayed in your list. What is an actionable task? It's a task you can do directly, right now.

GTG also has the ability to add plugins to extend its core functionality.

One of the plugins is Geolocalized Tasks Plugin

What is this plugin for ?

A lot of us have to go to different places throughout the day. We need to go to office, attend classes, buy something at the supermarket etc. If you use one to-do list for all the things to do, it can become cluttered, showing all your tasks at once and making you less productive. So, you certainly want to see only those which you can do at the place you are right now

For eg: - When you are in your office looking at the things to do today, wouldn't you want that "Feed the cat!", "Put the baby to sleep" be shown only when you've returned home ?

Thats where this plugin comes into picture. Through this plugin, you can set locations to your tasks and tags from a map.

How ?

Suppose you have 3 types of tasks - to do at home, at office, and things to buy from the market.

Open a task -

Set a location,

thats it!

Now you can configure GTG to show only the list of items to buy when you are at the market. When you are at home, that 'to buy' list won't be displayed, but the tasks you've assigned location 'home' to will be shown. Similarly, you can set your office location to all the meetings tasks so that "Feed the cat !" doesn't pop up in the middle of the list and irritate you

Here's a video which shows the original plugin in action. It shows the different ways of assigning the location to tasks and tags

So, what's the project ?

When the plugin was written in 2009, things were pretty different back then. Geoclue had a python2 library, GNOME 2.26 was released, and GTG was getting prepared to be shown to the world for the first time. Now, geoclue has been rewritten, and since GTG now uses python3, we have to switch to the new one compatible with it. Currently, the plugin is not possible to activate (bug #697870), GUI is outdated and needs polish.

GTG already has a plugin infrastructure and creating a simple plugin is very easy. There's this excellent HowTo page which shows each and every step for creating a new plugin. Also, the example plugin shown there can be used as template for a start.

So, your task is to rewrite the plugin. Here's what you have to do -

Come up with your own UI. You can take inspiration from the interface shown in the video.
Add the ability to set locations to tasks and tags.
Functionalities -
- Filter tasks based on location

If you can think of other functionalities this plugin can have, I'd love to discuss them.

Info for applicants

Knowledge of Python3 and GTK3 will be needed. Basic knowledge of GeoClue2 and what is libchamplain will be helpful (Don't worry if you can't understand much. The 3 months are more than enough to learn the basic methods that will be needed for this project).
Geoclue2 will be used for getting user's location and Champlain will be used for displaying it on a map.

A contribution to fill the application

A vital part of the application process is getting to understand the technologies that are going to be used in the project. Once you get a feel of how they work, using them isn't very difficult. It would be nice if you played with the technologies involved. Learn how DBus works, what is geoclue, why are we using it etc. Try to think how you can integrate all the stuff you've just read into a working model.

Once you have the confidence of putting it into action, make a small and simple prototype which fetches the location of a user and displays it on a map.

I'll leave the implementation details upto you. But remember, If you have doubts at any step, or something is not working as you expect it, I'm here to help, so don't hesitate to contact me

This is to demonstrate that you have grasped the basics and that you can successfully combine them into something that actually works (Thats what matters at the end, right ?). This will also convince me that you will be willing to learn more such things during the program. When the prototype runs, ask a developer to review the code (for code style etc.) using launchpad or mailing-lists.

Contact details

mail
IRC (Nick: parin, #gtg on Gimpnet, Timezone: IST (+0530))

Apps/GTG/opw/2013/DecemberMarch/Ideas/GeolocalizedTasksPlugin (last edited 2015-01-06 10:33:38 by OliverPropst)