I wrote about the need to integrate Tracker into Nautilus as the most important feature. Why? Because if I’m working on a file and save it, I need to be able to tag it – maybe from OpenOffice – but at the very least from Nautilus. Then I’ll have the ability to see all of my ‘work’ files or my ‘school’ files with a couple clicks of a button.

One other thing I’m annoyed with is constantly having to enter in a date format into my files such as ‘./my_documents/journal/20071031-nature_and_its_warmth.odt’. Why do I enter in my information that way? Because I would like to sort my data by date THEN title. You simple can’t order by multiple columns in Nautilus, nor have meta data such as date, author, etc.

“But wait a minute, you can add author data to a document in OpenOffice and I know for a fact there is a ‘date created’ field.” Why yes there is I would reply, but Nautilus can’t search the OpenOffice meta data tags and ‘date created’ is very shaky when you’re constantly backing up, moving, transferring and wiping files.

This way is Tracker read OpenOffice meta data (or photo meta data or music meta data) and it was integrated into Nautilus, I would be able to find any file I own with whichever specification I choose without all of this manual work on organizing my files.

But a default of making stuff just available will be nice for many users by removing the concept of importing. One thing less to understand and worry about.

I think things will become tricky if it’s about sharing files with meta-data. Where would it go for a file you put online? If it’s a file-format that can’t transport such info? Maybe a wrapper file-format (/container)?

Also, your friend might have tracks tagged “Rock’n'Roll”, but you prefer to have just “Rock”. OK, that sounds rather made up What I want to say: suddenly it could become interesting Who tagged something and to have conversions. Mapping one taxonomy to another.

Although, you probably want to ask first before indexing any removable media just to be polite. And maybe there could be an option to, well optionally, store a copy on the index for the removable media on that very media. Not so nice for small sticks, but it would be nice for my removable HD if I plug it into my other Ubuntu system if it was already indexed… =)

Always consider the corner cases.