Tracker

Revision 5 as of 2006-11-12 04:20:15

Clear message

Tracker is a synergy of technologies that are designed to provide a highly sophisticated, innovative and integrated desktop.

Tracker provides the following:

A nice summary of how tracker can make your desktop rock is given below :

  • Imagine downloading an mp3 file to have it automatically appear in Rhythmbox, complete with artist and track information.
  • Imagine shooting a photo on your digital camera and having it appear in f-spot, without having to be imported.
  • Like tagging? tracker lets you apply tags to files, freeing you from an endless hierarchy of folders.
  • Tracker not only allows you to search for files based upon what's inside them, but also by properties which describe them (metadata).
  • Tracker is smart. By treating files as first class objects it knows that Photos have widths, while Music files have artists. Tracker knows that Documents have authors and Videos have durations.
  • Want to find photos taken with your Nikon digital camera? no problem!.
  • Want to find all Openoffice documents created in December, with more than 10 pages, containing the word "cheese"? no problem. Tracker can do it.
  • Tracker is the glue that helps developers connect GNOME together, and the reason users will love the GNOME and Ubuntu platforms.

Tracker is written in 100% C and is designed to be both fast and efficient with your system's resources. Tracker's performance profile includes:

  • Small - <5mb RAM, great for low-end systems, and easily meets Ubuntu Fiesty's RAM usage targets

  • Fast - hundreds of searches per second will not slow your computer, drain your battery or waste your system resources.
  • High-performance indexing - can index your files faster than most other indexers (especially when run with --turbo)
  • Standards compliant - tracker has a dbus interface and utilizes the FDO technologies and specs

Current Plans and integration with Gnome apps:

  • We already provide an excellent and efficient desktop search capability for files with its own tracker-search-tool, nautilus integration and deskbar integration but will be expanding on this to include emails, chat logs and applications in the next month or two
  • We will be expanding our T-S-T GUI to provide more advanced searches using specific metadata and extensible metadata/tags
  • We will in the near future provide SLAB, tiles library and a snazzy GTKFileChooser replacement which will all exploit tracker's features including tags
  • RhythmBox already provides tracker as a plug-in but the maintainer is also keen to exploit our first class object technology and extensible metadata capability by utilizing tracker instead of its current XML database

  • Epiphany wants to use tracker's first class objects for bookmarks and history management whilst also providing searches for them
  • Deskbar applet is planning on using tracker's database for storage needs
  • Leaftag maintainer happy to use tracker as a backend for tags
  • Longer term we plan on creating our own file manager for tracker which can fully exploit tracker's full potential