Advogato blog for jamiemcc

16 May 2006

Tue, 16 May 2006 12:33:36 GMT

Blog moved to http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/ (has been for some time!)

21 Jan 2006

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 11:59:40 GMT

Tracker and Nautilus Search

I have created a Nautilus search backend for Tracker which enables you to do lightning fast indexed searches using Nautilus's new search interface.

If you are using a pre-release of Tracker, you will need to delete the hidden .Tracker directory in your home folder and then grab the latest source for tracker from Gnome-cvs (cvs -z3 co tracker).

Upon successful compilation and installation, you can then index stuff by running trackerd with an optional parameter specifying the full path of a directory to index (EG trackerd /home/jamie/Documents). If you omit the parameter, it will proceed to index your entire home directory. You can make sure that tracker only indexes a subset of your home directory by editing the tracker.cfg file in ~/.Tracker (which is created when you first run trackerd) and setting WatchDirectoryRoots=/home/jamie/Documents;

Once you have some indexed contents, you should now compile Nautilus (ver 2.13.4 or higher) which should auto detect that tracker is installed and automatically compile in tracker support. You are now ready to appreciate a powerful and super efficient c based indexer in all its glory... happy hunting!

To make sure trackerd always start when you login to Gnome, you will need to add it to Gnome-session (select sessions from preferences menu, select startup program tab and then add /usr/bin/trackerd). For non-gnome installations, see the desktop docs for how to auto start an application.

Coming soon, release 0.0.2 of Tracker which includes support for Inotify and some other optimisations.

10 Dec 2005

Sat, 10 Dec 2005 12:20:06 GMT

Pre-Release of Tracker

I sent out a pre release of Tracker to interested parties to demonstrate its powerful search and metadata handling capabilities.

Tracker can already do Google/Beagle style searches but more interestingly it can also do RDF queries too which means you can search for stuff by specific criteria. The criteria can include all your own custom metadata too as well as the standard ones specified in the File Metadata spec

The To Do list for Tracker is now shrinking with the following major features to be done :

Optionally use an Inotify integrated Gnome-VFS for file monitoring
Optionally use GConf for settings and for accessing registered thumbnailers.

The other cool feature of Tracker is its non-bloated implementation, high performance and low low memory usage (at typically 3MB to 6MB ram used it uses up to 10x less memory than beagle whilst offering more functionality).

25 Oct 2005

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 18:07:22 GMT

Tracker is coming

Tracker which I have designed as a replacement for Gnome's Medusa is coming along nicely (about half complete). Once complete it should make it easier to provide support for things like VFolders for GnomeVFS as well as a generic metadata store for all files/apps and especially Nautilus.

Tracker implements the File Metadata spec which I designed to cover all the basic metadata needs. I am hopeful I will soon be able to leapfrog both OS/X spotlight and Vista in this department with support for fist class documents too (emails, conversations etc).

4 Jul 2005

Mon, 4 Jul 2005 21:12:06 GMT

Pathbar added to Nautilus Browser

Finally got round to adding the missing link. I have just submitted a patch to make Nautilus mimic the File Chooser compete with Pathbar.

Screenshot of new nautilus browser in action: nautilus-pathbar.png

Nautilus 2.12 is gonna rock with this and the new hierarchical list view. I figure a few distros are gonna ship nautilus set up as browser by default now...

27 Jun 2005

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 14:04:17 GMT

Having fixed some bookmark issues with Nautilus (and in particular replacing the propriety bookmarks with the GTK ones), I have decided it would be cool to have a side panel that looks and behaves much like the GTK FileChooser one.

Some other file managers are also heading this way, especially Thunar

Screenshot of what I have done so far: nautilus-places.png

Of course there is still some way to go - I need to have a pathbar just below the toolbar to complete the effect. In any case this should ensure that Nautilus remains one of the best file managers available.

Submitting a patch any second now...