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  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
  
  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

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GNOME 2.14 has been unofficially dubbed "The Searchable GNOME" for a reason. The latest iteration of GNOME takes desktop integration to a level where you can stop caring about the whereabouts of files on your file system, or indeed about the location of a specific piece of information in your personal information space or on the Internet. You probably already have forgotten where you files are, so the key to achieving the best possible comfort is

• Accept the fact that you have no idea where your stuff is;
• Realize that most of your data is in digital form, or can be digitized;
• Make sure that all of your personal information space is searchable, both online and locally
• Use the right applications! Always be prepared to sacrifice your favorite application in favor of one that integrates to your working environment most seamlessly

Your information space consists of all the stuff you have on your computer’s home directory (mail, documents, calendar entries, chat logs…) and, optimally, everything you have read and seen on the Web. All this information should be at your fingertips at all times.

GNOME hacker extraordinaire Jeff Waugh put it best in a recent interview: we need to get rid of the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) paradigm which has dominated on the desktop for so long because

"when I wake up in the morning, I don’t think that I have to rearrange my windows and sort my icons — they’re not the things that I find important. The things that I actually care about are people, events, documents and getting laid."

So we need a user interface that doesn’t get between us and those things that really matter.

So this is how close to Luis I can get though a single text entry widget on my desktop, the Deskbar applet: from this single interface, I can mail him, go to his home page as well as other relevant pages via a Google search, open past e-mail and chat conversations with him, and peruse any document on my hard disk mentioning him.

Fig. 1: Searching for Luis

Note that there is no indication in the above screenshot to the applications that will be used to handle this data. I don’t care, and I shouldn’t be bothered with such details. If I want to contact Luis, I want to click his name and write him a message. I certainly don’t want to peruse my application menus to find an e-mail application, open a contacts database to find his address and then try to remember what I wanted to say to him. Also, I don’t want to open a presentation program, find a file (hoping I have given the file a descriptive name and archived it into a reasonably discoverable directory structure) and open it. All I want is Luis-information!

The first commandment in making your stuff searchable: build your desktop around Beagle, and only use applications that Beagle is aware of. Do not give in to the lure of a non-beaglified application, be it as awesome as it may, if there is a beagle-aware application available. In short, choose freely from the list of supported applications on the Beagle home page, but do not look elsewhere. I’m sure Opera is a cool browser, but if you want your browsing history indexed by Beagle, don’t use it. If you use Thunderbird, switch to Evolution. Read news feeds with Liferea or Blam. Keep your notes in a Tomboy sticky wiki. Index your photos with F-Spot. Learn to love these programs, you have no choice. Your life will be easier. Really.

Believe the Web2.0 hype. Well, some of it. Much of your data should live online. Switch to Gmail instead of keeping huge local mail archives, simply because Gmail is more searchable. With Gmail you can keep all your mail, and you don’t have to organize it because their search is faster than your ability to figure out the organization plan you had in mind a year ago. I’m sure other mail services are just as nice, but a plugin happens to be available which integrates Gmail into the deskbar and thus into your desktop. Use del.icio.us and tag all interesting pages so they are also searchable from the deskbar. Another upside with keeping your data on other people’s servers is that (let’s face it) Google’s servers are more likely to stay up 24/7 than yours so you can get to your data from any machine, anytime. Similarly, use F-Spot to tag your photos and upload them to Flickr (why Flickr of all the photo upload services on the Web? Because that’s what F-Spot supports, and F-Spot is what Beagle supports!) Use Gmailfs or Box.net to store data you might want to keep accessible at all times.

Keep your address book and calendar online, especially if you need to access it from different locations and devices. I keep my info on the ScheduleWorld.com servers because they’ve built their service on open standards. The SyncML, iCal, and LDAP protocols they use enable me to handle and access my data from my desktop, laptop, and mobile phone, and keep them all in sync at all times. This is doubly valuable for someone who use the forbidden combination of a Nokia smartphone and Linux systems. Since I use Evolution on the desktop, my address book and calendar are integrated in all my GNOME applications where it makes sense.

The days of totally transparent interfaces has not yet come, and we cannot get to people, events, documents, or laid with the power of thought alone quite yet, but there’s no reason not to make handing our information as easy as possible.

Disclaimer: the above concerns the data in my personal information space. I have made accessing my information as easy as possible, not as secure as possible. Some of the methods, such as accessing Gmail via the deskbar, are inherently insecure. I don’t recommend using similar methods for your million dollar company’s customer database and information like that.

Technorati Tags: GNOME, search, web2.0, desktop

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