This post could be called “Ideas for GNOME Activity Journal during Zeitgeist Hackfest” too.

Every time I see a list of recent documents in some application, I never see what I am looking for. Checking the recent files on the Places menu of gnome-panel gives me nothing more than some links to pictures or text files I opened some time ago which are far from relevant for me right now. The same happens for similar lists in Gedit menu or other applications.

This very approach is initially being used as default for the new GNOME Activity Journal, which is the application who shows data from the Zeitgeist library. In general terms, the Activity Journal is a huge list of everything you did in your computer, ordered by time.

While having all this information is very useful, displaying it is nothing but tricky. Just listing tons of files sequentially won’t help anyone for finding the file you opened yesterday because the relevance “dimension” is missing.

If I just open some files and close them very quickly, than they shouldn’t be more relevant than the document I worked on for three hours. The photos I saw from my last travel shouldn’t occupy all the list of recent files, as I just spent some seconds in each of them.

Group similar activities can be interesting too. Facebook does that for news feeds and it works quite well. Seeing all the photos from my last travel is only one activity for me. Also, people open and close documents all the time. Make important documents easily accessible is more important than list the last closed one.