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Beagle UI Hackfest (24 - 25 September, 2005)

• Date: 24 - 25 September, 2005
• Place: #dashboard at irc.gimp.org

Join us on September the 24th on #dashboard (irc.gimp.org) where the hackfest will take place. Watch this page for more information!

Holmes at the moment

Hackfest goals

The goal of this hackfest is to create a new search frontend for the Beagle indexing and search system. Everyday users, graphic designers, programmers are all welcome. We strongly encourage you to join us and give us a hand in building the new search UI. This is also a good opportunity for potentional Beagle contributors to participate in and get to know the community.

UI Specs

• Widgets - The new UI will be built using widgets. We are no longer going to be using Gecko.
• Results view - The new UI should be able to display results for each category differently (there should be some consistency). In the mockup below, for example, mails are rows, but images are little boxes.
• Sorting - Sorting will be a very important component of the search UI. It should be kept simple and usable at the same time.
• Actions - Match actions are in the sidebar on the left; you select the match and then click on the action you want to perform (set as background, open in GIMP, etc). This gives us much more room to show matches.
• Tiles - Each tile type collection should be able to render itself as a box or a list view.
• Customization - The UI, search results and sidebar should be customizable.
• Experience - The UI must remain clean, robust and of course be fun to use!

Comment: shouldn't file-based search result tiles use some sort of Nautilus embedded view? It would be great because you could reuse the code, and you'd have the file manager's context menus and functionality directly available from the Holmes/Beagle UI. Of course, some of the Nautilus functionality does not make much sense for search results, but I bet 90% does.

The user should be presented with this the first time they launch the UI:

UI ideas

• Timeline - Implement something similiar to F-Spot's timeline.
• Implement a simple 'Find Similar Files' action (might decide this is a daemon thing, and not best)

Bugzilla

• #160333 - Should have an indication when indexing is finished.
• #302580 - Sorting of results.
• #304775 - Search window should remeber its position across sessions.
• #157210 - Highlight file in Nautilus . More information here.
• #311060 - Advanced queries in the UI.

Sourcecode

You can get the sourcecode from GNOME CVS. All the hackfest hacking is done in the module holmes.

$ cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome login
$ cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome co holmes

After you checkout the code you can build it and run it.

$ cd holmes
$ ./autogen.sh
$ make

Set your MONO_PATH environment variable to /directory/containing/Beagle.dll (usually /usr/lib/beagle or /usr/local/lib/beagle)

$ mono src/Holmes.exe

Note: Holmes development has been taking place against the CVS build of Beagle, if you plan on hacking, it is recommended that you do the same.

Tasks

Here is a brief list of the hackfest goals. It contains small tasks which anyone can pick.

• Design new interface
  • Fix spacing, grouping, etc.
  • Make sure it's HIG compliant?
• Search entry
  • Store search history and use entry completion
  • Use the proposed glass icon?
• Sidebar
  • Rendering - The current sidebar is hacky, we want to make it look so cool as in the mockup. (FINISHED: Mario Sopena Novales)
  • Hyperlink widget (FINISHED: Mario Sopena Novales)
  • Radio-Hyperlink list (FINISHED: Mario Sopena Novales)
• Search results widget (ASSIGNED: Lukas)
  • Categories
  • Icon view
  • List view
• Sorting
  • By type
  • By date
  • By score
  • By backend/application
  • By author
  • Advanced queries (ASSIGNED: D. Bera)
• New tile system
  • Open (FINISHED: Fredrik)
  • Register actions (FINISHED: Fredrik)
  • Convert old tiles to the new system
  • Thumbnails
• Fix the scoring system (daemon) - The scoring from the different backends has to be fixed. At the moment usually Mails get the highest score.
• I18N - I've been trying to mark all stuff needed to be translated with "FIXME: I18N".

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