First of all I’ll introduce myself for the new readers from Planet SoC and Planet GNOME. I’m 18 years old, live in Catalonia (but was born and lived in Germany before, my father being from there), I’m about to finish Technology Baccalaureate (after the summer I’ll start studying Computer Engineering) and I’ve been a GNU/Linux user for a bunch of years now; in fact, I’m an Ubuntu Developer and I intend to start Debian NM soon.

Now that you know I exist, I’m happy to announce that I’ve been accepted for Google Summer of Code and that I’ll be working for GNOME this summer :). But what exactly will my project be, you may wonder?

Well, so there’s that GNOME Shell thing I’ve written about before [0], and although less known there’s also that other project called GNOME Zeitgeist, which consists in logging all your activity -files you open, websites you visit, etc.- and providing you with a journal of it so that you can easily find stuff you were working on “the other day”, but it also has other handy features like establishing relationships between files which can then be searched for [1]. My project consists in integrating Zeitgeist into the former.

For this, I’ll be working on GNOME Shell to pull the data from Zeitgeist over D-Bus (adding a D-Bus interface to it was initially part of my project, but somehow I got involved in Zeitgeist soon after submitting my application I’ve already done this by now :)) and display it nicely in its Clutter interface. This will be done in the “Recent documents” space, but I also have ideas for putting Zeitgeist bits into other places; more about this in a month, when I’ll start working on it.

Ah, my mentor on this will be Seif Lotfy, the lead developer of Zeitgeist. Here you have a sample of his great predisposition to help: «<seiflotfy1> don’t make me feel clueless, or I will destroy u» (sorry Seif, I really had to quote this! :P).

[0] In case you don’t know what GNOME Shell is, it’s basically a redesign of the desktop replacing gnome-panel and the visible Metacity stuff.
[1] By the way, LWN recently wrote about both projects in «Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?».

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