Bridge
Revision 10 as of 2012-06-19 21:24:51
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The Bridge (working title) is an indicator providing quick access to previous actions, files and websites related to your current activity.
Rationale
User stories
- Jan is writing an article for her blog: she checks several Wikipedia pages, discusses some details with a contact in Empathy, takes a screenshot and publishes it. A month later, she opens the article in a web browser: the Bridge provides her links to the related Wikipedia pages, the name of the contact and the screenshot file.
- Jon is reading an article containing several links, he visits some of them and finds a video he downloads. Whenever he plays the video, the Bridge provides him the webpage he downloaded it from and a link to the original article.
- Jen is writing a python application. In the process, she reads a lot of documentation and asks questions on Stackoverflow. Whenever she opens her code in Gedit, the Bridge provides her links to the documentation she used and questions she asked.
- Jin is editing a audio file with Ardour, made of several sound samples coming from an online sound database and from his personal collection. Whenever he plays the finished track, the Bridge provides him a link to the sound database and the samples used.
Current state
Menu items
- A list of items, relevant to the active window, presented with their preview icon, favicon, mimetype icon or application icon, in this order of preference.
- A separator.
A "Focus on <window title>" checkbox item. When active, the indicator icon is dimmed and window tracking is disabled. The Bridge will keep its focus on this specific window.
Process
- The title of the focused window is parsed to keep only the part relevant to a specific file/website/activity
- This string is used to query Zeitgeist for a matching recent event
- This event is used to query Zeitgeist for related events
- These related events are used to build the menu of the indicator
- If it fails, the indicator is not displayed
- The process stops until a change is detected in the window title or if another window is focused.
HUD integration
In the HUD, results from the Bridge are presented in the form "Related Activities > item"
Getting Involved
- Name proposals :
- Bridge
- The Bridge
- ...
- Panel icon proposals (ubuntu-mono light and dark) :
- ...