wintermute-devel team mailing list archive

[SII <dante.ashton@xxxxxxxxxx>]

A typical concept in computing is the concepts of files and folders; you
have a file, in a folder. End of Story.
However, for Wintermtue to function properly, it needs more information
about these files, for example; every OS and desktop environment has a
'Pictures' folder,  a user could store holiday pictures in it, or textures
and images for programs like GIMP. A 'Videos' folder might hold clips from
YouTube, or TV show episodes, or entire movies. 'Documents' can store work
files, databases, a novel in the making, or a collection of ebooks.

The point is, the current concept is outmoded and obsolete; often requiring
a lot of user maintainance just to stay organized. It needs replacing.

To a user, a .avi file could be a video taken from their phone, or camera,
it could feature them during their holiday, a tv epsiode, or a movie.
Wintermute needs to operate on these terms, and for this, one of the first
things that needs doing is to look and rip out metadata downloaders from
other programs.

XBMC/Boxee/Moovida use downloaders for recognizing and downloading
appropiate metadata about movies and tv shows and music.
Banshee/Amarok/Rhythembox use them for downloading the lyrics, cover art and
other misc. data about music.
Programs like Calibre use them to download the synposis, author, publisher,
ISBN number etc etc of an ebook.

Wintermute must also use these tools, and many more, to recognize the
content it manages; the end result should be, at the end of the day, that I
can ask for the plot synposis of 'Frankenstien' just as easily as I could
ask to watch all the films starring Bruce Lee.

In short: Wintermute needs to see and understand the user's data in the same
way the user does.