News and announcements

Zeitgeist 0.3.2 – Shadowy Rumble

Written for Zeitgeist Framework by Siegfried Gevatter on 2010-01-20

Zeitgeist 0.3.2 – Shadowy Rumble

On behalf of the Zeitgeist Project team, I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Zeitgeist 0.3.2. This is the third development release, leading up to what will be our stable 0.4 series. It introduces bug fixes and other performance optimizations to work with GNOME Activity Journal.

What is Zeitgeist?

Zeitgeist is an event-logging framework for desktop and mobile devices. Applications can push events into the log, and anyone can query the log via the rich query API. The logged events are semantically categorized and can come from any sort of activity, such as file usage, communications, and browsing history, etc. The Zeitgeist engine is a user-level service and does not have a GUI. It is intended to support dedicated journaling applications aand deep integration with other desktop components.

Where?

Downloads: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/+download

About Zeitgeist: http://zeitgeist-project.com

Wiki: http://live.gnome.org/Zeitgeist

News since 0.3.1

    * Added FindEvents, optimized shorthand for GetEvents(FindEventIds(…)).
    * Fixed DeleteEvents and make it ignore bad requests.
    * Fixed GetEvents not to raise an exception when called with an empty list.
    * ZeitgeistClient.get_version() now returns a Python list.
    * Some code refactoring, documentation changes and other little fixes.

Cheers,

Seif Lotfy

Zeitgeist 0.3.1, Mystical Tremor, Released!

Written for Zeitgeist Framework by Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen on 2010-01-10

The Zeitgeist team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 0.3.1 of the Zeitgeist engine. This is the second development release leading up to what will be our stable 0.4 series.

What is Zeitgeist?
----------------------
Zeitgeist is event logging framework for desktop and mobile devices. Applications can push events into the log and anyone can query the log via the rich query API. The logged events are semantically categorized and can come from any sort of activity such as file usage, communications, and browsing history, etc. The Zeitgeist engine is a user level service and does not have a GUI. It is intended to support both dedicated journaling applications as well as deep integration with other desktop components.

Where?
---------
Downloads: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/+download
About Zeitgeist: http://zeitgeist-project.com
Wiki: http://live.gnome.org/Zeitgeist

News since 0.3.0
----------------------

 * Add a FindRelatedUris() method to the core DBus API (also to the Python
   client lib). This can be used to find URIs that occur in relation to
   a set of events, sorted by relevancy. Please note that FindRelatedUris()
   is still marked as experimental and we can not guarantee stability yet
 * The Zeitgeist engine now exposes a Blacklist API over DBus which can be
   used to block events from entering the log
 * The engine now also exposes a fine grained monitoring system that can be
   used to listen for updates to the log
 * InsertEvents() now return an event id of 0 for events that are blocked
   or otherwise fail insertion
 * Extensions can now provide hooks to block or change events before they
   are inserted into the log
 * Remove support for more than one backend. What was known as the
   "Resonance backend" is now just "the engine"
 * Removed method from DBus API GetLastTimestampForActor
 * Lots more unit tests added
 * The engine will now load a default set of extensions on startup
 * Overhaul and restructure our Sphinx-based API-documentation system. This
   has facilitated automagic documentation of our enumerations and Manifestation
   and Interpretation classes
 * API documentation is more or less at 100% both for the DBus API and
   the Python client library
 * Bash completion for zeitgeist-daemon
 * Code style cleanups
 * Bugfix: You may now request more than 999 events in one go from GetEvents()
 * Bugfix: In find_eventids where using more than one event template resulted
   in all but the first one ignoring the timestamp restriction
 * Bugfix: Fix URL of Interpretation.APPLICATION to correct Nepomuk URI
 * More bugfixes

Zeitgeist 0.3.0, Voodoo Resonance

Written for Zeitgeist Framework by Siegfried Gevatter on 2009-12-01

On behalf of the Zeitgeist team I am proud to announce our first development release, Zeitgeist 0.3.0, leading up to what will be our stable series which will be 0.4. It is our intent to aim for a 1.0 release as soon as we feel good about the stable series, but that is still a bit in the future. Now that we've crossed the initial hurdle in the rewrite we expect the release cycle to be much shorter than this one, although we have not settled on something strict yet.

As many of you know the bulk work on this release was done in the Zeitgeist hackfest in Bolzano. Since we came back we been busy little bees polishing it up and fixing bugs - trying not to flame eachothers too much when discussing the designs :-) Working face to face in Bolzano gave us a unique chance to really discuss things through and get to the bottom of the details. This will also affect other develops a bit since...

We were bad boys and decided to change both our internal database structures as well as our public DBus API. Sorry - but after long discussions we all agreed that this was for the best. The new design is leaps and bounds better than the old one. This means that you both have to give up on your old log database, and accept that there are no GUI written for the new API just yet. This is being worked on as you read this though!

Something that might come as a shock to some other developers is that we decided not to store annotations and bookmarks within Zeitgeist. This should be done in Tracker or some other semantic metadata storage[1]. Zeitgeist answers only when and how data was accessed, but stores no information about the current state of the metadata. We will be working very closely with Tracker from now on since 0.7 is a blessed dependency for GNOME 2.30. Congrats to the Tracker Devs.

You can download the release from: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/+download

The NEWS entry reads:

First development release leading up to the stable 0.4 series. This release features:

 - Complete rework of engine and DBus API. Read: apps written against 0.2.*
   will most certainly need an update (see fx.
   http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-November/msg00019.html)
 - Public Python client API defined in zeitgeist.datamodel and
   zeitgeist.client modules
 - Documented public API with Sphinx (we'll have an URL for you shortly)
 - Changed Ontology from XESAM to Nepomuk.
 - Removed the Storm backend (obsoleted in 0.2.1).
 - Removed the Querymancer backend.
 - Support for event payloads (binary attachments to events)
 - An extension API for the core engine, allowing extensions direct access to the DB
   There are already a handful extensions things in the works here, you will hear
   more about this later

There are a few DISCLAIMERS that needs to be attached to this:

 - The event notification/signals are not yet ready in the new DBus API.
   We expect to have that ready for 0.3.1.
 - We plan to support querying only for available items (eg. filtering out
   deleted files, not listing files on detached USB storage, etc.). However this
   feature is not fully supported yet, even though it is exposed in the API.
 - While we are pretty satisfied with the database layout, there may still be
   changes in the ontologies or concrete data extraction methods. This might
   require that users delete their log databases in order to rebuild them
   with the new definitions. Of course this will no longer happen when we
   go stable
 - Much related to the point above our event ontologies are not yet set in stone,
   and minor changes are expected
 - We have only one logger enabled for now. Namely the one monitoring your
   recent files. In coming releases this logger may well be deprecated in favour
   of application specific plugins.
 - And finally. Please note that this is a *development release*. We can not
   guarantee stability of services nor APIs, although we strive hard to keep
   things stable.

Cheers,

Mikkel

[1]: There have been talk about defining (and implementing) a very simple DBus API for storing semantic annotations (bookmarks, tags, comments, ratings, etc). In our internal speak such a service is called a Repository. Tracker or Soprano would expose this API in most cases, but on platforms where they are not available the simple Repository implementation would be most handy. This being said, it is currently not a high priority to implement a Repository, there are alternatives ready in Tracker and Soprano.

Zeitgeist 0.2.1, for your enjoyment!

Written for Zeitgeist Framework by Siegfried Gevatter on 2009-08-16

One month after the first Zeitgeist release (0.2), here is Zeitgeist 0.2.1! This version, which is fully backwards compatible with the previous release, fixes a couple of issues, provides enhanced performance and removes the dependency on Storm and on a patches PyGTK+ version.

Here is the full changelog:

- Added compatibility with Python version 2.5.
- Removed the Storm dependency, obtaining general performance improvements.
- Removed the need for a patched PyGTK.
- Made the GtkRecentlyUser logger more robust (fixes an infinit loop on some
systems).
- Improved performance of DeleteItems and UpdateItems.
- Fixed a problem with the contents of the EventsChanged signal.
- Fixed InsertEvents to enforce "mimetype" as a required value.
- Fixed a bug where the sorting_asc=True in FindEvents would be ignored if used
together with mode="mostused" (LP: #404947).
- Highly improved caching.
- Added a "--quit" option to zeitgeist-daemon to stop any running daemon.
- General code improvements, new test cases and other minor fixes.

Additionally, it also adds the possibility to use a list of strings (instead of just a single string) as value for the "uri" and "name" filters; if used, the condition between the different values in the list is OR (so you can do, for example, "name": [u"%ubuntu%", u"%debian%"] to get all those items with either "ubuntu" or "debian" in their name).

The credits for this release are: Mikkel Kamstrup, Seif Lotfy, Marks Korn, Natan Yellin and Siegfried Gevatter!

Go get it now! (Note: Zeitgeist by itself doesn't provide any user interface and shouldn't be relevant to end users. However, a GTK+ interface depending on it should be available soon, followed by GNOME Shell and other products which will also use it.)

Updated on 2009-08-16. Read more