Syvo3

So, my first Nepomuk meeting is over (as you will probably get to know from other sources), and here there are my impressions.

First of all, it has been a real pleasure knowing Sebastian Trueg and all the other guys (and the only woman, of course!) who met in Freiburg the last weekend; the place was quite cool (especially the fact that the conference room was just below the bedroom floor), and the surroundings were really beautiful.

Three devel days

Well, actually for me they were two and a half, because I arrived on friday noon, but anyway they have been surely interesting: I have to admit that I got a little lost in the first day discussion about some ontologies details; at least now I can say that I know something more about the Nepomuk internals.

On saturday the use cases discussion about social desktop and how to integrate it with the semantic one continued from the evening before, but we also started developing some things, about which I will tell in a few lines; I especially liked the sunday: we took one of the case studies, and each of us took a piece of the necessay libraries and tools that were missing from current Nepomuk release, with the aim to be able to make that use case real; we didn’t finish it, but it has been interesting and even fun to collaborate with the others with one common target.

My place in the world

So what was my part in all this? Well, I will start with the last day’s work: the use case was about allowing users to share metadata about files from a computer to another computer, so the user of the latter would be able to see those files in his searches, and to open them (downloading them on the fly) and add more metadata; anyway, I’m sure other people from the meeting will explain all this with more details.

My task was to add a popup menu for Dolphin, so a user can right-click a document and decide to share it with friends; then a little dialog searches all the user’s contacts, allowing him to choose whom to share with and if he wants to be informed about any changes.

Konqueror plugin

For now, I have been able to create a popup menu for Konqueror, in the form of a Konqueror plugin library, and later I will add it to Dolphin too (why Dolphin does not read also library plugins? It would be so useful…); what is missing in the plugin is just the final call to the Nepomuk service, of course through DBus, and this will be done in the next few days (and maybe I will blog about it later).

In this workshop I also wanted to share ideas about the smartsave dialog and its current status; for now, we decided to rethink about the filters UI, and put this new UI also in a Dolphin side panel, so users will start to see it and use it, and realize how useful it can be; this side panel may also be able to get into a KDE release easily.

Faceted panel - early preview

So what I did on saturday was to bring the filters panel, as it is now in the semantic open dialog, into Dolphin itself: the integration is still in an early stage, there are still some bugs to be solved, but it basically works; the next step will be to change the way in which filters are shown, and this even deserves a new paragraph.

Filtering

The filter panel will become a complete faceted browsing system, and we decided to reduce filter types to three categories (at least for now): time (today, yesterday, this week, last week, this month…), “rough” document types (documents, images, media…) and tags; probably contacts/people will be the next category to make its way into the panel, but at the current status it is not a priority.

I will prepare soon two different UI layouts, because there have been some debate in how to show these facets, and I think some screenshots will be better than lots of words trying to explain it, so for this you’ll have to wait 🙂

Final words

In the end, there have been three wonderful days, lots of fun and code and chatting and pizza and things; I really liked the whole meeting, and I hope I will be able to participate to the next one, too.