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).