QZeitgeist and Phonon

[Trever Fischer]

If you haven't been keeping up with Phonon development recently, no biggie. 
Very recently, we introduced an optional build time dependency on QZeitgeist. 
Today, someone said I should mention this to k-c-d. So here goes:

* What is QZeitgeist?
A library that neatly wraps the Zeitgeist dbus API with some QObjects.

* Okay, but what is Zeitgeist?
A desktop history tracker. You do things. Things such as: view a website, play 
music, chat with friends, read mail, write a document, post to identi.ca, or 
work with stuff in inkscape. Zeitgeist then compiles for you a database of 
everything you've done and intelligently links things together.

Example: I read a mail from my dad. Inside the mail was a hi-lar-ious video I 
want to share to a friend. Problem is, it is now 3 days later and I can't 
remember anything about the mail it was contained in. Oddly enough, I remember 
the music Amarok was playing at the time. Party Hard by Andrew WK. Good stuff. 
Oh yeah, and there was that funny youtube video sometime around then I found 
in irc. My aunt would love that...

*ahem*

I open up gnome-activity-journal (currently the only interface to view the 
history; others are planned), search for something related like the music, the 
youtube video, the irc chat, etc, and *bam* there is that media file. It is 
listed next to all the other stuff I was doing at the same time.

* How does this fit into Phonon?

Anything played by Phonon now shows up in zeitgeist. Provided that they follow 
our documentation and set the correct QObject property. If that wasn't needed, 
then Zeitgeist would get spammed with everything from KNotify.

* Why should k-c-d care?

For two reasons, really:

1) It is a new *optional* build-time dependency. If Phonon is compiled with 
QZeitgeist, but zeitgeist isn't installed, stuff still works. Once zeitgeist is 
installed, the dbus interfaces work their magic.

2) The zeitgeist developers (and even the Phonon devs) would absolutely *love* 
to see more KDE apps use Zeitgeist. Its pretty cool.


-- 
Trever Fischer (tdfischer)
Fedora Ambassador, KDE Hacker
http://wm161.net
GPG: C40F2998 hkp://wwwkeys.pgp.net
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