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Content Tagged with awn + tracker

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 :).

...not that far actually, just been very busy at home!

I have, however, had time to straighten up some cool tracker stuff!

Nautilus Metadata Tile
After speaking to Alex in #nautilus, it seems that we could really make something very cool, utilizing nautilus & tracker/beagle. He has given me direction regarding what would be accepted into Nautilus. He had some sweet ideas regarding file previews etc. As far as I know, no other OS has these capabilities. I am going to dedicate a whole entry to it later on in the week, with mockups etc.

Tracker Search Tool (TST)
I have been adding the code from Nautilus Metadata Tile into TST recently, trying to get it in before the 0.6 release of tracker (at the time of writing I still don't know whether it will make it) :(. However, to whet your appetite, I can show you some early screenshots :


As you can see, it works quite well :). The tags bit is my favourite, because it is really simple to add/remove tags:

• Clicking the "add" button shows you a GtkEntry, where you type in tags separated by spaces, then click "apply" to apply or "cancel" to, er, cancel.
• The tags themselves are clickable, so they will launch a new TST, and set it to search for the tag.
• Right clicking the tag gives you a popup, letting you search for the tag, or delete it.

I am going to send the patch tomorrow, and hopefully, Jamie can add it to tracker svn ASAP (if I, you know, haven't broken every single coding rule known to man).

Avant Window Navigator
I have been a bit short of time regarding Awn, but I am dedicating tomorrow to it, so expect some cool stuff (as per usual), and thanks to everyone who has been bug reporting, sending translations and sending patches! Translations and patches will be merged tomorrow. Also, I have a little ace up my sleeve...only thing I can say is that it concerns setting up an array of pixbufs at incremental sizes for the launchers & tasks ;).