This is user documentation, i.e. what can you as a user do with Gnome Zeigeist. It is not intended to give you a technical overview of what happens inside the application. For that, refer to the developer documents.
Gnome Zeitgeist (GZG) is an application that tries to keep track of your workflow. It does so by keeping your web browsing history, your document history, image history, etc. all together.
If you are like most people in front of a computer, you do a variety of tasks, that are not done in the same application (program). E.g. you work on your documents, while browsing the web for sources, while chatting online with your colleague, and sending emails to your boss about the fantastic progress you're making. All of a sudden you have to do something completely different for a couple of days, and your nice train of thought is lost. When you restart, you need to piece back all those small parts to put you back on track.
Wouldn't it be nice if there was somewhere you could turn to bring up all the different pieces of information that were necessary to restart your work?
Well, there is. GZG will do that for you.
When you start GZG you see a small icon:
in your system tray (commonly also called "notification area"). That is the visible evidence that your daemon is running. A daemon is a computer program that runs in the background, rather than under the direct control of a user; they are usually initiated as background processes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computer_software)
Click the GZG icon, and a window opens. This is your Journal:
You also have some other options from this icon: Right click and you'll be able to open Project Viewer and Timeline, however, these are works in progress.
As you'll see, the open window has tabs, and we'll begin going through the Journal tab
The journal has a main area, which is your timeline, each day separated. Each day has different items of your history, each with a fitting icon, so you can tell what it is (web history, document, etc).
If you look in the top part of your journal window, you'll see some buttons, we'll discuss these first.
There is another way of going back in time, if you need to jump far. See [Link to Calendar button] for that.
The other buttons are toggles, meaning when you click them, they remain pressed until you click them again.
Clicking the tag button
will bring in a sidebar to the left of the window.
Tagging is great for easy sorting stuff that relates to work, private, family, etc. You can use as many tags as you'd like.
At the top of this sidebar you'll see a small drop down box. You can choose between "Recently used tags" and "Most used tags".
Below the drop down box there are buttons with possible tags corresponding to what is chosen in the drop down box. By default the buttons are the names of the directories (often called folders) that your items belong to. That is because we tend to sort things in directories or folders, so it's a pretty intuitive start. When you start making your own tags, they will also be included in this area after having been used a little.
There are several ways to add or remove tags to your items:
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By dragging and dropping the buttons to the item
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By right-clicking and choosing "Edit tags". Choosing this will open a new window. In this window you add and remove tags in two ways:
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Manually enter the name of a tag. Separate tags by using a comma (,). Removing these tags is done by just removing what you wrote.
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Click a tag button to add it. You'll see the button looks pressed. Click it once more to remove the tag.
You can view your tags in several ways:
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If you let your cursor hover over an item, you'll see that the tags for that item are put in the bottom of the box that shows.
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Using the input box on the right side of the main Journal window, you can write in the name (or part of the name) of a tag, and the main area of the journal viewer will show only those items that match by tag or name.
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Using Filters, see next section
Clicking the filters button
will open a sidebar on the right side of the Journal window. This is where you choose what GZG will keep in its history. If you want to turn off logging of something, this is the place. Categories that are not checked will not be appearing as items.
Clicking the calendar button
will bring in another piece in the sidebar on the right side of the Journal window. This is a calendar, and you can pick a date to move your starting point to a particular date.
In the top right corner of the Journal window is the input box that we discussed in [Viewing your tags]
Moving down the right-click option menu, we have the "Show related items" https://bugs.launchpad.net/gnome-zeitgeist/+bug/374394 option. Choosing this will open a new window that lists items that could be related to the item you're looking at. This is based on what items were used at the same time, and if that usually happens. So, it is prone to mistakes, because it will also contain not related items that you just often happen to use at the same time.
Removing items from Zeitgeist
Sometimes you'll want to delete items from Zeitgeist due to various reasons. It may be crowding the window, because you always open that web page, or it might be something that you'd rather not want anyone else using your computer to see in your history. You can then use the right click menu on that item and choose to delete it from Zeitgeist.
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Note
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Choose carefully when you remove stuff from Zeitgeist. It might just happen that you'll need that item later on. For example, it might seem like a good idea to leave all your Gmail conversations out of Zeitgeist, but what happens when you need to track down that particular conversation that includes the source of what you were working on? |
The Bookmarks tab is empty the first time you run GZG. This will contain the items that you have chosen to have fast access to. The star
next to all items is a checkable button. It will light up when checked:
Note that GZG bookmarks doesn't have anything to do with the bookmarks in your web browser. Adding or deleting bookmarks in one, will not change anything in the other.
Items that are bookmarked will go into the bookmarked tab. When you bookmark one item, all instances of this item gets bookmarked.
In addition to checking the star, you can star an item by right clicking on an item and choose By right-clicking an item and choose "Bookmark".
Removing the star is done by the same ways: Right click the item, and choose "Unbookmark", or click the highlighted star.
