When Tracker was proposed for GNOME 2.18 I was one of its staunchest supporters, arguing that a GNOME wide unified metadata storage system would enable a richer desktop experience, and take GNOME beyond its competition. Tracker did not make the cut for GNOME 2.18, and will no doubt be proposed again for GNOME 2.20.
To help people see the potential of a GNOME desktop using Tracker I have been working on two projects for the past little while. Both of these are components of my larger vision of a metadata rich GNOME desktop. These initial attempts just focus on making tagging [1] a more consistent experience for all GNOME apps. Consider the examples and screenshots (for a file called nice) below;
- Freedesktop emblem spec
Allows desktop file managers and indexers to present a list of predefined emblems and tags to the user, and allows these predefined emblems/tags to be installed by third party developers in a consistent manner. - Tracker Nautilus Integration
Nautilus using tracker for storage of all tags and emblems. - libtracker-gtk
A bunch of gtk widgets that application authors can use to add tracker functionalit to their application.
Industrious individuals could probably find the bzr repositories for the above work, but at the moment it is not quite ready for prime time consumption. Stay tuned for more news.
[1] Terminology:
- Tag: A descriptive keyword the user has associated with a file
- Emblem: A tag with an associated image
Thank you for this post John, I’ll keep an eye on your work.
Hopefully we’ll see something new on the gnome-vfs/FUSE side of things too: it would be wonderful to be able to have live-queries mounted as directories via trackerfs in a sane way.
please, please: don’t jump too far ahead of yourselves with a widget library. instead, write an GObject-based API that is *not* the D-Bus-GLib-autogeneated-wrappers for us developers who want to extract stuff from the tracker db. because right now it’s a mess.
pretty please, with the sugar on top.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387922 ?
I regret for tracker exclusion (from GNOME), but I trust Ubuntu Team
If I can, I suggest you something about libtracker-gtk, something like
http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=50430
[it's just a mockup that require work on libsexy]
Hope the best is yet to come,
-Matteo
Totally awesome. Stuff like this, with Tracker integrated, could be one of the core components that makes GNOME really stand out. Thanks for the great work, keep it up.
Tracker is amazingly fast, it really needs to get into GNOME.
I put together a demo GUI for Tracker daemon. Using Mono.
It’s just for fun it’s not much, take a look:
http://ghaefb.rebootcomic.com/2007/02/07/tracker-ui-demo/
Hi John,
How goes the progress on this? I recently installed Ubuntu on my laptop and am in the final(ish) stages of configuring. I dumped Beagle in favor of Tracker (mostly for the tagging), but alas can’t do the tagging of files until 0.6. I did get Tracker successfully working in Deskbar after using the workaround to keep it from crashing.
My goal is a tracker enabled Nautilus that will allow me to make Virtual (or Smart) Folders using Tracker tags. This way I can have one repository for documents and keep them in multiple virtual folders as necessary. Very convenient for writing papers, books, or classes where one document is used in multiple situations. I set this type of system up for my wife on her Mac and it is very sweet. Would love to have it on Ubuntu.
Ideally you could tag while saving files. Find tags in Nautilus and DeskBar using Tracker. And then make Smart Folders based on tags.
If you have any code that is ready to play with I’d be happy to try it out! Michele from the Tracker List said you were working on something called Nautilus View and that this might be what I’m looking for.
Cheers,
Greg
Hi John! Idea is really great, I’m awaiting it for a long time already. What is the state for now?
There is a few suggestions I have:
There should be a way to sync metadata from Tracker with outer world. I would like to not connect metadata to Tracker but to files themself (e.g. xattrs). This way if I will copy/move files, metadata will be there as well (provided target filesystem supports it).
It will also be nice to be able to choose indexer (Beagle, Tracker, Strigi etc). I’d even prefer to have two indexers: one very fast and another with morphological analysis of different languages to find all word forms (it will slow down parsing too much).
Virtual folders and file tagging is really great and I’m waiting for it!
I could not find this site in the Search Engines index
I too would like to see the tagging support in nautilus and all the virtual folders. the tags would be more practical stored with the file as someone here suggested. oh and tell those ubuntu folks to get the .60 in their repositories
Where can I find this “Tracker Nautilus Integration” that you speak of?
Hello! pilex
This demo is already available by means of http://avilib.com/ and according to it, we are awaiting something very very cool!!!