Finding And Reminding

Status: Obsolete

Description

It is important for a computing environment to provide a simple and effective way to find, organize, and be reminded about content and data. In the past, we've had files on the desktop, and a places menu in the panel, 'special' (xdg) folders, recent files and various search plugins in nautilus and the file chooser.

A detailed analysis and proposal for how to address this problem space in gnome-shell is GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/FindingAndReminding.

The current design for an application to deal with finding, organizing and viewing documents lives at Design/Apps/Documents.

Owner

Cosimo Cecchi

Involved Parties

GNOME Shell (Florian), Design (Jon McCann), Zeitgeist (Federico Mena Quintero, Seif Lotfy, etc) Tracker...

Current Status

This feature is now merged with Features/FilePreviewing.

(Historical status follows)

In GNOME 3.0, we no longer show files on the desktop, and we don't have a places menu anymore. We still have 'special' folders, and recent files in applications, and search plugins in nautilus and the file chooser.

Zeitgeist developers have started to work on a prototype implementation of the finding-and-reminding design (see this post by Federico). You can see the demo here.

There is also a prototype for a zeitgeist-backed, a tracker-backed as well as a hybrid (tracker+zeitgeist) search provider for the shell overview.

Progress and tasks are being tracked in the DocumentCentricGnome page.

Cosimo is working on an implementation of Design/Apps/Documents; the code is in the gnome-documents git repo now.

How to Help

Please read the DocumentCentricGnome page for detailed information about pending tasks.

A Summer of Code project is being evaluated to implement much of this; ask FedericoMenaQuintero for details.