One of the big tasks for Gnome 3.2 is the "Finding and Reminding" idea. This has been sketched out for gnome-shell here:
http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointOne/Features/FindingAndReminding In summary, Finding and Reminding is about having a good way for users to do their daily work. People manage various files, web sites, and conversations. They receive files, edit some of them or create new files, send the files around... they may research something on the web, talk to a friend or colleague about it over IM or VOIP or whatever, and generally use a combination of tools to achieve their work. People need their "working set" of data; they need to refer to previous work; they need reminders of what to do later. This is well-documented in the HCI literature - in fact, "Finding and Reminding" is the title of a well-known paper, by Nardi and Barreau, that explores the kinds of interactions that people have with their work, and the kinds of behavior people adopt: No filers - They don't file anything. They try to survive in the soup of data. Spring cleaners - They try to organize things when the system seems to be breaking down, or when it already has. They frequently fail. Frequent filers - They try to keep things organized and in order, but this is a tremendous amount of work. However, things fall away from their view (think of the story of Little Miss Tidy - she kept everything in a cute little box, but then she had so many boxes that she didn't remember which box contained what). Jon McCann came up with the terminology "grip / trip / slip" for categories of information (http://blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2010/04/07/the-grip-the-trip-and-the-slip/): Grip - Things which you need frequently must be "at hand" - easy to reach, easy to grasp. Trip - You should be able to "trip" into useful things easily and frequently, as opposed to tripping with useless debris all the time. Slip - Things which become useless or obsolete over time should fade away from your view - they shouldn't persist in your everyday view of things, as they would clutter your vision. >From an ergonomic-thermodynamic point of view, or in other words, the universal maximum-laziness principle, we can restate those concepts like this: Grip - I have better things to do than to be searching for the same data everyday. Just give it to me whenever I need it. Trip - I am too busy/lazy to maintain post-its of things that I may find useful. Useful things should just materialize near me. Slip - I am too busy to clean up after myself, especially when the computer lets me accrete so much crap. It should clean up for me. Let me start by saying that NO SYSTEM IN PRODUCTION has a solution to this problem. Unfortunately we cannot just copy a solution from elsewhere, because there isn't one. So, we need to accept that we don't know what the end result will look like, and we need to accept that we'll need to do a healthy amount of experimentation, guided by careful judgment. The solution has various parts: 1. We add a time-based view of the user's work - a "journal", or "history", or whatever you want to call it. In it we present files that you have used, conversations you have had, web pages you have visited, etc. By now everyone is familiar with my old GUADEC presentation - http://people.gnome.org/~federico/docs/2008-GUADEC/html/index.html , the Zeitgeist and gnome-activity-journal efforts, and similar. For the journal to have good "grip", it must be easily-accessible from wherever you are working. Both the current mockup and the implementation create a third item in the shell's overview, next to Windows and Applications - but this is not "grippy" enough. It's too far removed from the desktop. This is easy to solve; I'll talk about this later. We can start to have "trip" by presenting items from your to-do list right in the journal, as those items have due dates, anyway. Also, we can let you mark files so that you'll be reminded about them later (in Getting Things Done's parlance, this means having a "tickler file" right in the journal). Think of right-clicking on a PDF, and being able to say, "remind me to read this PDF in two weeks, because my homework about it is due in three weeks". "Slip" comes about naturally from the time-based view. Items which you no longer use will automatically "scroll away" in the timeline. Items which you reuse will appear in your recent dates again. 2. We add channels of circulation to apps that let you work with data, so that you can navigate your things more easily. Right now you can open files from the file manager, but not all apps let you open the file manager to show you the file you are editing. See http://people.gnome.org/~federico/news-2010-08.html#19 for how Evince was fixed in this fashion. In an identical way, we can start adding "Open in file manager" commands to other apps. EOG, Gedit, and LibreOffice come to mind. I'm sure you can think of hundreds of examples :) In a related way, we can see what other kinds of connections would be useful to have in various apps. Clicking on a contact should definitely give you a list of files that you've shared with that person. One should probably be able to list all the files that you've sent to someone else at some point, as in "people ask me for the same stuff frequently; show it for me so I can fulfill the next request easily". 3. We begin to see the interactions between the items above, and start designing how to further improve the behaviors across the shell and apps. Now, (1) and (2) are things which we can do in the immediate future. The journal is particularly interesting - it should give us something that no other shipping platform has, and it should immediately give us interesting feedback from users. After that, we can see how to integrate more sophisticated concepts: * The "reminding" part. Seth Nickell called it a task pooper - http://blogs.gnome.org/seth/2010/02/26/let-the-wild-rumpus-begin/ . The "Getting Things Done" people call a similar concept a "tickler file". The idea is that you put stuff in time buckets in the future (today, next week, next month) and you get reminded when the time comes. We'll have to fine-tune the interactions; this has to be as simple as dragging a file and dropping it in a pooper-like bucket (and probably writing a description of *what* to do with the file). * Making the journal a really user-writable journal. Write notes in there, annotate files and journal entries. * Present related files to the ones that you selected (Zeitgeist already has the data-mining smarts to do this). * Group items by tasks or projects. This may be about tagging a-la-emblems, or something else. Who is implementing this? The infrastructure for the journal is of course the Zeitgeist engine and its data loggers. Akshay Gupta recently mailed this list; he is my Summer of Code student who will be working on gnome-shell's journal. Seif Lotfy and myself are working with him on this. Although I'm sure I'll make Akshay modify some apps to add the "Open in file manager" command, it would be very helpful if people could do this with their own apps. Feel free to mail me for details. The design itself Here is where we are asking for help from the cadre of designers and the gnome-shell maintainers. From the experience with gnome-activity-journal, we already know about some things that work well, and some that don't, in a time-based journal of the user's work. * Big Fat Eraser - this is a mode in the journal where you simply click on things to delete them. "Oops, no, I didn't want this web page logged". "Oops, no, I visited that file but it wasn't the one I wanted". For that you turn on the Eraser, and click away. * A column-per-day view as in my original presentation - this is just too sparse, and plays badly with scrollwheels. The linear view (even if it is on a rectangular grid) is much better and fluid. * Web pages. There are just too many of them in a single day! Gnome-activity-journal helped here by grouping them in an expandable item, "N web pages", rather than showing all the crap you visited during a day. An alternative would be to add an explicit "log this page" button to Firefox, or something. One of the things we need to think of soon is the immediacy of the journal. Having "Windows / Applications / Past Activities" in the shell's Overview is just too clunky. Seif posted to the list with his idea to move those three actions to the shell's top panel, thus replacing the "Activities" button. I quite like that idea; it removes one level of indirection from the things you do the most, and it gives you present (windows), past activities (the work you did, the journal) and future activities which you might do (applications), *right there* in the main panel. Another thing is the "grip" of the journal. Making it a full-screen thing within the Overview means that you can't easily drag a file from the journal into a running window: you can't save a file from oowriter, open an Evolution mail composer, and drag your file from the journal into the composer to make an attachment. If we had the "Past activities" button right in the top panel (or somewhere as a first-level object within the desktop), then we could perhaps pull it down a bit so that it doesn't obscure your mail window, and then you could drag the file from there. Note that this is similar to what I had in my GUADEC presentation - keep the journal very close at hand, and don't make it use the whole screen. Feedback is welcome! Federico _______________________________________________ gnome-shell-list mailing list gnome-shell-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list
