Friday 2 March 2007

Hi pgo!

Hi Planet GNOME'ers!

Firstly, let me say thanks to Jeff for adding me so fast :)! My name is Neil J. Patel, I am 23 years old, and am a Pharmacologist (yes, you read correctly) who lives in London, England. I love GNOME and spend my spare time working on a few projects:

Avant Window Navigator
Avant window navigator (Awn) was my first project, it is a Gnome-based dock which, as taken from the website, "sits on the bottom of your desktop in all its composited glory" and handles the launching of applications & active windows. It also has a D-Bus backend which allows applications to control their icons. Some examples are Rhythmbox setting the album art ask its icon, Evolution displaying the number of unread emails on its icon, Firefox showing its progress on its icons, and Gaim showing your status as your icon. A picture says a thousand words, so :


Awn also has a wiki & forum, and you can also catch me on #awn on irc.gnome.org.

Metadata & Desktop Search
Tracker is where the rest of my free time goes! I work on several projects surrounding GNOME regarding metadata & search:
  1. Nautilus & Metadata Integration : I am working with John Stowers on a proposal for including metadata & tagging/emblem support in Nautilus, where by Nautilus can use Beagle/Tracker to pull info regarding a file + display it in a metadata tile, and it can use the FreeDesktop emblem spec for emblems, so you have a uniform experience across the desktop:
  2. libtracker-gtk : This is another effort by John and myself to have a more integrated experience across the desktop, by having a set of reusable widgets which can be easily added to any application. Therefore, you now have a library which will consist of many cool and useful widgets such as a model-view-controller based list of results, a metadata-tile, a GtkEntry with automatic keyword-completion, a tag cloud etc.
  3. A new blingy search tool/media browser/viewer: based somewhat on these mockups, and using a Tracker backend, but more on that later :).
Er, what else? I think that's it for now, I have lots of mockups for different UI ideas which can be found here, I can't bring all of them into reality, but if you want to, let me know if you need help with some of the more extravagant looking Gtk stuff :).

11 comments:

stereoit said...

Hi,
I really do like your mockup of multimedia center. I hope you do not mind that I pointed to you guys doing development of Elisa Multimedia Center (http://www.fluendo.com/elisa/).

Keep rocking!

Anonymous said...

Wow, on day I subscribe to your rss feed, and then the next I have to unsibcribe, because you got added to p.g.o!

Anonymous said...

Welcome Neil! So awesome to have other hacker-inventors aboard the good ship Planet.

I really like what you're doing with AWN, it makes me wish I hadn't gotten distracted with the non-bling aspects of Gimmie!

Anonymous said...

For the yum frontend stuff, take a look at gnome-app-install in Ubuntu

Anonymous said...

please look this...
http://www.linux-usability-desktop.net/nautilus-metadata.html

Neil J. Patel said...

@alex : Hi! Dude, Gimmie rocks! I think its the future of GNOME, either as a Dock or as the cool applet.

@coreyburger: Hi, gnome-app-install is where I got my inpiration from :). Something like that is sorley missed in Fedora. I hope to dedicate some time to it next week.

@anon: Thanks for pointing that out, I have already been shown that by the author. It look very nice. The Nautilus Metadata Tile stuff has no finalized look/UI, my screenshots are just a demo of whats possible.

Anonymous said...

I really like the tag cloud and i can see 3 possible implementations:
1. a tag section under gnome-main-menu which shows the cloud
2. a system tray or panel applet
3. a sidebar for nautilus to show the cloud
What do you think?

Bader Lejmi said...

I don't get the thing around Tracker.
Why won't you use libextractor (from the GNU project) which supports way more file format and is terribly faster.
A OO database seems totally useless while you just want to get the metadata of a file...

Simone Saravalli said...

Hi Neil, excuse me if I write here, but I have a question: when I use tracker to search some .tgz files named, for example

simone_website_2007-03-02.tgz
simone_website_2007-03-03.tgz

I find them from tracker-search if I select "All files" and I type tgz into the "Search" field, but if I type "simone_web", for example, tracker-search doesn't retrieve any result? I understand that tracker-search only wants files extensions or complete files names but isn't it useful if tracker-search could locate files which name contains the word provided by the user?

Unknown said...

Hi,

veeeery nice nautilus widget. Could we get the code anywhere in order to use it from now on with tracker on my own machine? ... and provide some feedback if you want some...

thanks!

Anonymous said...

WooW =)