no favourites or recent documents

[Stefan Bethge]

Even though the favourites and recent documents extensions are activated, there are no items and category items shown. The checkboxes are grey. I'm guessing this might either not be possible to disable or it could be a weird way of showing that I need zeitgeist installed? There should be a better visual representation like an error message when trying to activate them in that case.
As other applications can show recent documents without zeigeist, I wonder if the functionality is broken in some way.

Cardapio version is 0.9.158

The only terminal output is: (cardapio:8623): GConf-CRITICAL **: gconf_client_add_dir: assertion `gconf_valid_key (dirname, NULL)' failed

Cheers

[Thiago Teixeira (tvst)]

"Recent documents" is an experimental plugin that requires Zeitgeist with the full-text search extension. We should probably make it use regular Zeitgeist, or just remove it.

Now, I'm not sure what you mean by "Favorites". We do have support for "pinning" items to the menu, if that's what you mean.

[Thiago Teixeira (tvst)]

Oh, and the way other apps do recent documents without Zeitgeist is using Gnome's (or is it XDG?) recent documents API. But that's not what Cardapio's "Recent documents" plugin does.

[Thiago Teixeira (tvst)]

See https://answers.launchpad.net/cardapio/+faq/1192

[Paweł Bara (keirangtp)]

Docky marks some helpers as Usable - other are just hidden from the user (he may optionally show them of course).

Maybe we should just let the plugin define it's 'what do I need to run' criteria? In most cases it would be nothing but in some it may be a presence of some D-Bus object's (like Tomboy) or some kind of dependency (Zeitgeist). This would let us to mark plugins as unusable even before they are initialized.

[Stefan Bethge (kjyv)]

Yes, I'm referring to the pinning extension. In the description it says "Shows your favourites" (translated from my locale), so I was calling it favourites. Anyway, I now see the reason it is called that way and found the ability to pin an icon. I expected something like a most used applications feature, so basically the automatic version of pinning. Don't know if you want to have that feature (maybe with zeitgeist as well?) but there is no problem with the current one. About the other problem - I think it is not as nice to only show elements that can be used. It might be good to let the user know that a certain feature is available but he needs to install additional packages. I don't like the docky approach so much since it is a bit cluttery.
Also, why not use the recent documents api if zeitgeist is not available?

[Thiago Teixeira (tvst)]

> In the description it says "Shows your favourites" (translated from my locale)

Is there a word in your locale that you could use to better translate "pinned"? or the idea that they are manuall-saved favorites (instead of automatically discovered) ? If so, it would be great if you could edit the translation here https://translations.launchpad.net/cardapio

> Also, why not use the recent documents api if zeitgeist is not available?

That's a good idea. The recent documents plugin is in dire need of some love. The thing is, I don't have much time right now to devote the required attention to that plugin (I've been focusing on bug fixes), but hopefully one of the other Cardapio developers or can pick it up. Or maybe someone from the community, which would be even better :)

[Stefan Bethge (kjyv)]

I had a look at the translation, but it's actually the same in english: Displays your favorite items
The title of the extension if fine, it's just the description. Uh, yeah, gnome api for recent documents,
I might have a look when I have time ;)

[Thiago Teixeira (tvst)]

> The title of the extension if fine, it's just the description.
Thanks for catching that. I will tweak the description.

> I might have a look when I have time
That would be great! Thanks