Flow is an application indicator using the Zeitgeist engine. It brings contextual relevancy to the desktop, with a quick way to access related information and activities to the current one. It can be seen as a simple reminder or as a new way of interacting with documents, websites or even IM contacts , providing the feeling that all these items are connected to each others. Proposing this tool is assuming that what can be seen as a single activity by the user (eg. editing a file) is the fruit of many, as it provides this information to the user.

For short, it provides what the user is probably needing to accomplish his current task, based on his previous actions during this particular task.

Definition : Is considered as "activity" or "task", almost everything Zeitgeist can track : webpages, opened/played files and IM conversations.

Mockups

Rationale

The Flow menu provides a quick access to activites related to your current one in a simple and unobstrusive way. If clicked when no activity has focus on, it presents the most used activities on your computer during the last x days. When an activity is focused, it presents the most used activities with this one.

User stories

• Jon is on his on-line bank account, he opens the Flow menu to access the file "accounts.ods". He also sees that when he manages his finances, he mostly listens to Metallica.
• Cameron is working on a presentation about european socialism. While chatting with his classmates, he opens the Flow menu and is proposed to access his main document and the wikipedia pages he uses to check.
• Sarah is editing a php file for her website. When she needs information about a function, she opens the Flow menu and is remembered that she can ask her friend Hollie who knows about php (she helped her some time ago on this particular website), she also can check the online php doc, or look in another php file she wrote.