Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Nepomuk and Dolphin

Sebastian Trüg already blogged about the Nepomuk Coding Sprint that happened last weekend in Freiburg. It was great to meet all the guys in person and to share ideas face to face. Sebastian was a great host and I liked the general spirit of the meeting :-)

I just wanted to give a short summary from a Dolphin point of view. On the weekend the following things have been improved for KDE 4.3:
  • The labels for Nepomuk meta information have been fixed.
  • The usability of the comment widget in the Information Panel has been improved.
  • Performance problems when renaming several hundreds of items have been fixed. Originally I thought this has been caused by Nepomuk, but it was a Dolphin internal issue.
  • We could track down the root cause for freezes when a tooltip is shown for huge PDF files and MPEG files. Originally we wanted to discuss whether we want to use Nepomuk instead of Strigi to get the meta information, but it turned out that only two Strigi analyzers need to be fixed to respect a maximum size setting.
Well, I was not as productive as I wanted to be. The main cause was that my development environment on the Notebook was not setup properly and it took me some time to fix it (until this sprint I did not use my Notebook for development).

The more interesting thing is what we’ll try to improve for KDE 4.4:
  • Better search integration. Although Dolphin for KDE 4.3 offers a search box, this is just a first start. We did some discussions and Dolphin for KDE 4.4 will offer a user interface element to configure the search query in an easy manner. Maybe this interface element can be used by other applications too if it works well.
  • Fix usability issues of the tag rating widget. The tag rating widget in the Information Panel has some usability issues. Gwenview goes into the right direction I think and the goal is to have a common widget for KDE 4.4.
  • Sebastian introduced his Formatting Rule System which might be very useful for the Information Panel. It requires a lot of work as it is still in draft, so it’s unclear whether we can integrate this to KDE 4.4 already.
Generally I was impressed how much potential Nepomuk offers. I think it will take quite some time, but I’m convinced that real innovative things can be done in future by using Nepomuk (especially in combination with PIM related applications).

12 comments:

frustphil said...

Could you please take a look at this one: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196706

It's a really annoying feature of Dolphin...

Thank You!

Raúl said...

Do you think that at some point in the future it will be possible to have an "awesome bar" in dolphin using Nepomuk. What I mean is that assuming I have some files tagged I could just start typing this tags in the dolphin address bar and it will show me the possible matches like in firefox or opera

Chad said...

Thanks. I'm definitely looking forward to search integration with Dolphin. It's good to hear that you're already thinking about how to keep improving it as well.

Chad
http://linuxappfinder.com
http://feedsanywhere.com

Unknown said...

" * The labels for Nepomuk meta information have been fixed."
Great, I loved to see being fixed :D

kedadi said...

@Raul

Maybe the search bar will do the job (hopefully for 4.4) or just by clicking a tag in the Tag Cloud.

Unknown said...

@Raúl:
> Do you think that at some point
> in the future it will be possible
> to have an "awesome bar" in
> dolphin using Nepomuk.

Yes, that would be possible and think is a good idea.

@cumulus007:
The current fix is not perfect yet. We could not provide a way to forward the properties to the translator team before the 4.3.0 translation deadline... :-( However we are optimistic to do a "real fix" in KDE 4.3.1.

Erlend said...

Dolphin absolutely rocks, and tighter integration with Nepomuk sounds exciting. Thank you for your excellent work!

Unknown said...

Nepomuk & Dolphin is going to be huge. Thanks so much for blogging about the ongoing progress of Dolphin! Cheers!

scroogie said...

This is a somewhat interesting post about the metadata handling in Nautilus. Perhaps it can be interesting for you as well.

http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2009/06/24/data-about-data/

Ignat said...

Glad to hear that the "great Dolphin PDF freeze bug" has been finally tracked down to a Strigi issue. When can we expect this in trunk (or is it there already?)
Regarding the rating widget, maybe you should look at the one that Digikam uses? It seemes very usable to me, especially when you need to remove that one remaining star (which is quite difficult to do with Dolphin widget).

kost BebiX said...

Hi! Could you please help me telling how to manage and create my own "actions" menu item? My JID is kost-bebix@ya.ru. Thankyou!

Anonymous said...

When is konqueror going to regain its ability to see the destination of symbolic links in a column in detail view?

Size, Date, Permissions, Owner, Group, and Type, are the only columns that can currently be selected.

I don't care about Dolphin, but, it should be possible in Konqueror. It was possible in Konqueror, until Konqueror was butchered for the sake of kde4.

Not being able to see the destination of a symlink is just ridiculous. For gods sake, just add in an extra column which can show me where my symlinks point.

Please.