Use Cases for Zeitgeist User Interfaces
Here follows a list of user interactions that User Interfaces, using Zeitgeist and other software projects (Tracker, Teamgeist, etc) could provide.
- John Hacker can't remember what he worked on the previous day. He opens the Journal and looks at the files in the Development section, to find out he didn't work at all because it was Sunday and he was tired.
- Sara is writing a book and has some files she uses all the time (the office file she's editing, a couple important PDFs with information about the city the book is based in, etc). Thanks to Zeitgeist she can easily find those most used files and open them with a click.
- Tim and Joe are doing research on dinosaurs for a school project. They both set their browser activities to shared and always know what pages the other one is looking at. Using IM they can easily talk about them without having to exchange links.
- Leonor downloaded a file to her desktop. Now she needs some additional information from the website she downloaded it from, but she forgot where that was. She can find the URL using Tracker, but unfortunately the website doesn't have the information she needed anymore. She then looks at the Journal to find out what day she downloaded it, and can easily look up the previous version of the website in the Internet Archive.
- Mark starts a conversation with one of his clients. He is surprised to find a collection of resources (files, websites, contacts, etc.) related to the job, and uses it to quickly find information his client asks him for.
- Prof. Togepi is doing a research on computer usage patterns. He uses Zeitgeist to easily collect data from his test persons.
- Daniel was at a conference a week ago and wants to remember what computer resources (files, websites, contacts, etc.) he used there. He opens the Journal, sets up a location filter and thanks to geolocation data gets a list of everything he wants.
- Evan's boss wants monthly reports of what he has been doing. Writing achievements to a notebook each time they are completed is more worry than doing everything at once when the report is due. Now that he has the Journal he can do this much more easily.
- Mundungus is tired of working and decides he'll finish what he's working on next Monday. He opens the Journal and creates an "activity group" in the area for Monday and uses the "Save currently open resources" option to place everything he's currently using there; he also drags some additional resources (files, websites, contacts, etc.) he used earlier this day into the group box. Once that's done, he can close everything he's doing and focus on watching his favorite lolcat pictures, without worrying about not finding his resources again.
- Bonnie Ughunter wants to document every Ubuntu bug she touched each day on her blog. In stead of doing it manually each time throughout the day, she sets up Zeitgeist to tag each web history item beginning with "bugs.launchpad.net" as "bugs", so she can easily copy them to her blog at the end of the day.
Random ideas
So you have an idea but don't know if it's a use case for Zeitgeist or other applications around it? Write it down here so that we can consider it!
- Giampaolo can't stand anymore the old folders' paradigm, and would love to classify and search files like emails in gmail. Actually, he would love to access anything, including emails, in the same way!
- Felipe wants to know which application is causing his computer to overheat. Since Tracker records all system activity (wish), it is easy to find what application is running when the cores reach the warning zone.
- Felipe wants to know the website he was browsing last friday night while he was listening to "Memories".
- Felipe wants to know what time did his internet connection shut down last night while he has downloading that huge iso image.