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Date notation and IM logs

Speaking of dates, I have been working on a design for an IM log viewer for Beagle (well, it would be in Gaim ideally of course) and how to make it easier to use.

This is how the Gaim viewer currently looks. It does sort the logs by date, but each item is in a tree, and the tree is collapsed by default, so it is hard to browse it through. Basically it allows you to view your logs of course, and there is a search. So not that bad.

So how to improve it? This is my attempt:

For the most part it is the same, but there are a few small but important details:

• The dates are shown in "this week notation", with more categories for recent items ("today", "yesterday" and "this week", "this month")
• Instead of showing "Fri 19 Nov 2004 10:33:05 PM EET" for the log entry, actually show a snippet of the beginning of the log - it makes it much more identifiable when you can see the content.

Of course some intelligent stuff needs to be figured out so the logs wouldnt show "hey dude?" for each log But maybe show the first line that is longer than a two words? Or something like that.

Also, show the time for the log entry in the list only if that day has more than one log, otherwise just the date is good. The log view part of the window or statusbar can show more detailed information, it does not need to be visible for all of those logs at once. Too much detail in a list of several items makes it just cluttered very easily, and once you have hundreds of logs it becomes a nightmare to find stuff.

Editors note: Of course the "show all logs" button should be "Find" before you do a search, ignore that part for now

By the way - what if there was a Nautilus view that queries Beagle for file info and sorts them in a list view based on this date idea? I think I might like it a lot in practice.

I often just sort by modification date in file dialogs and Nautilus to find the recent stuff - there are a LOT of files on my folders, I am lazy to sort them into folders (then I'd need to search for folders first - and scanning through the last modified order just seems to work best.

Small Details: Date

One thing we really should look into in Gnome is how we represent date strings. I like the new Evolution alarm dialog a lot, but instead of having

• Start time: Tue 11/23/2004 01:30 PM
• Start time: Tue 11/24/2004 09:00 AM
• Start time: Tue 11/29/2004 3:30 PM

...we could have something like:

• Start time: Today, 1:30 pm
• Start time: Tomorrow. 9:00 am
• Start time: Next monday, 3:30 pm

At least I am finding the "human language" version easier to understand. I need a calendar to get an idea what "2004/11/29" means in real-life terms, while "next monday" is immediately obvious. Many times when you see a time or date string, you want to know how it relates to current time.

Alex's Tomboy has a nice "pretty printing" date function that does some of this, and Evolution has one in the mail header display (in the "Sent" and "Received" columns for example)

We could do the same with other strings that contain numbers or similar information as well. On a Mac when you download files, it just tells you "less than a minute left left" instead of "30240 bytes of total 40203 downloaded, 00:45 to go, 213.3 kb/s". If you want to know the speed, there is an arrow that you can click to expand the view.

A problem with Glade..

One of the things that hurt me when doing user interface mockups with Glade is that I cannot add content to list widgets. This would be very good for testing different ideas.

Instead I need to take a screenshot of an application that has a gtk list, and then use the Gimp to change the contents to something that fits my needs. Then I need to add them as images into Glade. This is time-consuming and also silly since those images need to be removed from glade anyway if the glade is going to be used with libglade.

Today I figured that running "zenity --list --column=foo" and typing lines of text into the terminal will populate a list that I can then screenshot. This removes the "add text with Gimp" part but it is still far from optimal.

It would be so good if Glade could just populate lists for mockup purposes like it can do for a comboboxes or menus.

“JPEG” tile in beagle..

So, a bit more tweaks (I hope you dont get bored by these ) - this is indeed a real screenshot and not just a mockup - you can see it from the scrollbars, I would use gtk ones if it was a mockup since that is the goal definitely..

I added some more information to the jpeg tile. I just need to talk with Dave so I really understand how those tags really work - beagle has some smart logic that it can hide parts of the template if the data is not available etc, so I need to study that a bit more.

Anyway, this starts to look nice for my photo search needs - and once Beagle uses the .thumbnail standard it will make my .NEF (Nikon RAW) photos thumbnails work (I have 20 gigs worth of NEFs on this harddisk) - The fun thing is, NEF is a very very weird incarnation of TIFF format (basically just something that is not very TIFF wrapped inside a TIFF container..) - but the cool thing is, the thumbnail is a valid tiff thumbnail. So Nautilus shows them. This rocks.. So, Nikon is clearly better than Canon for Linux geeks

Some tweaks for Beagle

So, I tweaked the stylesheet a bit today to make photos (basically jpegs and files that have ".thumbnails" in their path) to have a nice photo-frame in beagle list. I think it looks nice. The ".thumbnails" is just for the future - it would make much sense to use the thumbnails from apps that support the freedesktop.org thumbnail spec (like nautilus does) - those are already there for you.

I also prettified the style a bit so that the titles are on the left, and everything else is indented a bit to make it easier to scan through the list visually. Also, we dont need to specify a "width=80" defined on the html for the icons on the left column anymore, since the stylesheet defines a max-width: 80 for the icons.

By the way, I put a work-in-progress spec for Beagle 1.0 UI online as well - comments welcome (for example here in this blog post)

More tweaks tomorrow, stay tuned!