April 21
The Document Journal
A little History
A while back when I was working on the OLPC project with Seth we took a good amount of time designing a new way for the people to interact with their documents. The design isn’t specific to OLPC, it was done because they were looking to take a new approach to documents and files. The approach we took is just as applicable to the desktop as it is to the OLPC.
What it is
I called it “The Journal”, it’s not the most inventive name. The Journal is an interface to the documents, images, movies, and other files you work with. It is designed to help you work with and retrieve your files, however it contains more than just files as it also understands events and people. It’s probably not the best approach out there, some of the ideas are a little half baked but it’s a new approach that I think gives interesting directions to take.
What it is not
While it may have strong correlations to many different existing projects and an implementation of the Journal will likely use some of these projects, they are not exactly the same thing. For instance the Journal requires a search across your documents, however the Journal isn’t a search service; it is an interface to finding your documents. An interface like the Journal could be fitted on top of a search service or a document store or another system, however the system or service running below isn’t the question to be answered yet, first we need to get a grasp on the interactions between a person and finding their stuff.
Currently the Journal isn’t any code, there are no secrets in it. It’s a bunch of designs based on a long time spent observing, researching, and brainstorming these interactions.
How it works
Imagine if your computer blogged about what you two did together every day. What would it say?
Bryan, you didn’t do much today (like usual):
- You created GNOME Document Journal icon (30 minutes total)
- You edited your GNOME Document Journal blog entry (4 times, 1.3 hours total)
- You responded to emails (12 replies, 38 minutes total)
In a recent blog entry about re-designing my blog for the future I reworked my blog interface to enhance the experience of exploring entries for my reader. I added meta-data and tags and provided extra lists for recent posts, popular posts, and related posts on each post page. The Journal and a blog interface have a number of commonalities, re-designing my blog was a quick and easy way to experiment, understand and test some assumptions that apply to the Journal.
Similar Wavelengths
There are a lot of open source projects on a similar wavelength so it’d be great to get together and talk about these ideas to see where we meet. Here’s my incomplete list.
- Beagle
- Tracker
- Gimmie
- Online Desktop (surprise!)
- Telepathy
- Timeline
- WordPress (a web app? OMG!)
- Dashboard
- Deskbar
If you’re working on one of these projects and want to incorporate any of these ideas into your project, please do. These are simply ideas and if they’re good we should be sharing them, IRC or GUADEC or anywhere we need to start putting out our ideas for what to do next into something real.
More
So I’m looking for help. I’m hoping other people are interested in a new way of interfacing with their files, doing something completely different from Windows, Mac, and others that actually makes sense. I know the OLPC is interesting doing this 
Since this is a new venture it’s going to take a while to cover and I don’t want to lecture, I’m hoping people want to take part in the design as a discussion. Before we go to a mailing list like desktop devel I wanted to write out a couple of entries describing what I think we know so far. So here it is, the first part in a several part series about the GNOME Document Journal.
It seems that the contents of this document journal, perhaps with limited access to the documents/files in question, could be mirrored on a private weblog for remote access as well.
Steven: Exactly! With the OLPC designs we had both a private web log mirror for all your files to be backed up on. As well as having a public local (avahi, http) journal that was a method for others to find and browse your files.
Dammit, Bryan. If you start actually innovating you’ll make me regret going back to school. NO INNOVATION FOR YOU.
I did some rough design for a program I was going to call “My Life” back in 98 and no-one has really come up with that really touches it yet, maybe http://www.stikkit.com comes close, but not really.
Most things that we do, both in our lives and at work, don’t fit into the methods that we use to achieve them. Our lives are much more centered around big things such as a project, moving, organising the childs foorball games etc. Email, web etc are just conduits that make these bigger things happen. The way that the computer industry is trying to fix this is the “find” metaphor. I think this is backwards. My desk is a mess, but I know where things are. I don’t send out a search party each time I need something. I should be able to look under the “Move to Boston” (tab/icon/balloon etc ?) and see all the documents, emails etc related to that. I had somewhat imagined an interface with ballons, those at the top were more important and most recent, floating lower less important or less recent, much the way life occurs. An even is coming up, happens, then floats away into the past.
To me this is not much use to me:
* You created GNOME Document Journal icon (30 minutes total)
* You edited your GNOME Document Journal blog entry (4 times, 1.3 hours total)
* You responded to emails (12 replies, 38 minutes total)
But this is:
Gnome Project
* You created GNOME Document Journal icon (30 minutes total)
* You edited your GNOME Document Journal blog entry (4 times, 1.3 hours total)
* You responded to emails (3 replies, 24 minutes total)
Moving To Boston
* You responded to emails (7 replies, 4 minutes total)
Brians FootBall Game
* You responded to emails (2 replies, 10 minutes total)
I even think that maybe it could be done on the Beagle or other search type engine code base if it’s repacked to basically flip the metaphore around. If the apps are modified so that the email can easily be tagged/moved to a project, that it’s easy to be looking at the contents of the balloon for “Moving to Boston”, and you can easily from there say, “New Email” or “New Document” and you create the item automatically for that. I guess it almost needs to be built into the Window Manager to make it work fully integrated.
I Hope I didn’t ramble too much and that it makes sense.
Andy
I’ve been thinking that it would be cool to take the task-focused UI bits of Mylar and spit out a “what I did this week” list. It tracks time, too. I realize it’s Eclipse-centric, but for those that use it, it’s cool
http://eclipse.org/mylar
Available in Fedora 7 with Bugzilla and Trac connectors.
Erm, isn’t this exactly the same as MS Outlook’s identically named feature?
[Open Outlook, "Go" Menu, "Journal"]
[Not that it isn't a good idea - but Outlook has had this for year's AFAIK and no-one I know uses it ...]
[...] finally posted something about the Journal idea that he and Seth had been worked on way back when. We’re using a lot of these ideas for some [...]
Andy: That’s called ‘implicit querying’, your idea sounds similar-ish to dashboard in that it displays items related to the item you’re working on now, folks realised they needed a search engine to back dashboard and so beagle was born.
Hi Dean,
I’ve looked at Dashboard a couple of times, and wondered where it went ( reading Planet Gnome I found out ), but it still doesn’t full fill my need, at least where it was left off. It’s great it contains my last contacts with Joe, but it they were about project ABC and I’m now working on project XYZ, it doesn’t matter.
I had originally thought what I had in mind was a seperate app, but I’ll describe this more as an extension to Nautilus with plug ins from different apps to make it all work, but it could be done either way
1) Select “New Project”, enter name and optional fields such as members etc. The members would be from a global address list.
2) Select “New Document”, select type, name etc and it’s added to project, edit and save.
3) Select “Email Document”, email list occurs. This would be a list of people who are members and anyone with emails who have emailed into this project before. Write and send email. This is all done from this “Project Manager”, without entering the email client, say working through a plugin in brings up a compose window with auto attachment. This is currently implemented, apart from the intelligent email address.
4) Have it auto check for emails, and add replies to the project. From the regular email client a user could also mark the email as being for this project and it would be visible in the project.
I hope that makes it a little clearer. As a Gnome user, it seems like a lot of the pieces are there, needs integrating.
I realise my thoughts go against the grain somewhat, in that the common thinking right now is to let all the different apps do what they want, and the current solution is for the app (Beagle, Tracker etc) try and bring all the data together in a sensible way.
My thought is to give the user much more power initially by allowing them to only use one interface and to remove the current emphasis on the program that does the job, and bring it back onto the function. Once this is done, the Journal or Beagle type functionality becomes a lot more useful, since it has some basis to go from.
Andy
Andy: Some good ideas. I would say the project creation stuff is a function of organizing and you’d use some kind of tag based system for that.
The reason, AFAIK, for the current train of thought where you say you go against the grain is that nobody can get all those ducks in a row. It would be really nice for us to get everyone on board with the total vision and move to something like what you’re talking about. However the steps that’s easiest for us to take initially is to exemplify the cool interactions that are possible in one application and as certain pieces make sense to integrate into other apps people do so.
Andrew: Thanks for the link, I’d never seen that before. It would be cool to have a good hook into what’s going on in Eclipse development. I think the Journal could just be an interface to expose that work along with your other things.
Lee: I’d never seen the Outlook Journal feature, hopefully I can take a peak at it sometime to understand what you mean. I wonder if it’s not useful because it doesn’t interface with anything except for email?
Bryan: I remember playing with the outlook journal a few years ago, things could have changed but I think it’s turned off by default. It does journal other outlook stuff too, calendar events and things, though that still leaves it far far away from interfacing with everything.
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