GNOME's Zeitgeist Engine Has Its First Release

One of the GNOME projects that's in development that should premiere around the time of GNOME 3.0 is Zeitgeist, which is the system for tracking user activity and events and then logging it, so that later on the user can use the Zeitgeist tool to browse or find events and files on the computer. This project is described by the Zeitgeist developers as, "You worked on a file, but you cannot remember where you saved it? You visited a web page about basketball three days ago, but you cannot find the URL in your browser's history? No problem, this is where Zeitgeist enters the scene. It knows a lot about your activities and has a feature rich D-Bus API which allows GUI applications like gnome-zeitgeist, zeitgeistfs and others to present you your activities in a readable way." Anyhow, the first release of the Zeitgeist engine is now out in the wild.

Announced over at Launchpad.net is the Zeitgeist Engine version 0.2. This is the first public release of this event logging framework. Some of the features for this Zeitgeist 0.2 release is an SQLite back-end for storing information, a D-Bus API for storing and retrieving data, and support for logging items and events from GtkRecentManager. There is also support in Zeitgeist right now for logging events from Firefox, Tomboy, Evolution, and Twitter. Plug-ins are also available for monitoring what's happening in Epiphany and Bazaar.

Beyond offering the source packages for Zeitgeist 0.2, there is a Personal Package Archive available to Ubuntu users. While Zeitgeist isn't yet ready for usage in a stable environment, it's out there now for those who want it.