All articles by Seif Lotfy

Lean mean hacking machine.

Seif Speaks: Faster Zeitgeist for Everybody

It has been a while since I posted here, but the Zeitgeist team has been very busy lately and rest assured that lots of news will be hitting this site within the next 4 weeks. Collabora has been pushing us to optimize Zeitgeist performance and scalability, and we delivered. The next release of Zeitgeist will provide you with better performance. In some cases there is over 100% speed improvement.

14 June 2012
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Zeitgeist Ported From Python to Vala

Zeitgeist has been ported from Python to Vala - what does this mean for you? A faster, leaner and more responsive Zeitgeist.

4 November 2011
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Seif Needs Your Help To Gather Some Statistics On Gedit

I am working on a dashboard (start page) for Gedit to make it easier for users to see their most commonly used files. We are not sure that for Gedit that "Frequent" is of interest for us, however before we take any decisions we decided to appeal to all gedit users who have been using Zeitgeist for over a month to use run the following script in a terminal via

27 October 2011
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Three Nifty Gnome Shell Extensions That Use Zeitgeist

Over the last few weeks I have been working on some nifty Zeitgeist extensions for GNOME Shell. I finally managed to finish all of these Zeitgeist extensions, and figured I'd share them with the OMG! Ubuntu! audience. Here's a brief rundown and instructions on how to install.

7 October 2011
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GNOME Screencasts Episode 1: The Basics

Picking up where the great gtk+ kick-start tutorial by Alberto Ruiz ended Daniel Siegel decided to introduce a new way of teaching new comers how to develop your own GNOME apps. His new initiative will introduce screencasts that will teach you basics of the GNOME platform and language bindings such as python, JS, C, Vala, etc...

17 June 2011
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From Ubuntu to Fedora – Landing on foreign soil (the good, the bad and the ugly)

Recently I had to make a choice as to whether I wanted to stay with Ubuntu Unity or move to GNOME 3 and hence another distribution. I chose to move to Fedora because my work requires it, luckily though this has given me a new perspective as I have been a long time Ubuntu user.

25 April 2011
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Zeitgeist work towards GNOME 3.2

So with an awesome GNOME 3.0 out I already had some stuff prepared for 3.2 that can show off some of the power and awesomeness Zeitgeist could provide for GNOME 3.2 The designs are random till now and we (Federico, Siegfried and me) are waiting for directions. Until then we are doing what we think somehow makes sense for new GNOME 3.2 features.

7 April 2011
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My girlfriend’s desktop [Desktop Tour]

Due to some bad experience with viruses on her Laptop running Windows 7, my girlfriend decided to give Ubuntu another try. She is used to it since that is what I have running on my machine, but she never really liked the themes and the looks.

15 March 2011
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Activity Journal getting a new View

I am blessed with some amazing team. The magnificent Cando just finished a new view for Activity Journal.

31 December 2010
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Skype Zeitgeist logger under development

Check out this Skype zeitgeist logger I have been working on.

29 December 2010
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Elementary’s new Wingpanel in action

I took some time today to fight with libindicators and fix some issues the current wingpanel. It is as a very experimental piece of software. And by no means is it the new panel for elementary.

22 December 2010
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Docky: mastering the art of jump lists with Zeitgeist

As an avid docky user (sometimes I switch to AWN depending on my mood), I got very used to the jumplists. But at some point I was not satisfied with what I hacked before, since it was based on the early 0.3 Zeitgeist API.

19 December 2010