Bridge is a cool new indicator developed by David Callé (who's also behind some great Unity lenses and scopes), that uses Zeitgeist to provide quick access to documents, files and websites related to your current activity.
There are many cases in which you'll find Bridge useful. For instance, let's say you visit some website and download a video. Months later, when you open that video, if you can't remember the website from where you've downloaded it from, you can take a look at Bridge which should display a link to that website. Or, let's say that while working on some document/project, you do your research on Wikipedia and other websites, save some images on your computer and so on - when you open the document, you can quickly see the websites you've accessed, images and other related resources from Bridge.
Besides the related items, there's one more menu entry in the Bridge indicator: "Focus on <window title>" which can be used to keep focus on a specific window and disable tracking of other windows of the same type.
The Bridge indicator icon is only displayed when there are items related to your current activity (focused window / active tab) and is hidden when there aren't any related items. This can be a bit distracting, at least for me but it could easily be solved in the future by either implementing an option to always show Bridge Indicator or to completely hide the indicator and use Bridge from HUD only (if it's possible to use HUD with hidden indicators). That's because HUD can search indicator menus too, so you can already access Bridge results via HUD (they show up as "Related Activities").
Besides the related items, there's one more menu entry in the Bridge indicator: "Focus on <window title>" which can be used to keep focus on a specific window and disable tracking of other windows of the same type.
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| Accessing Bridge via HUD |
The Bridge indicator icon is only displayed when there are items related to your current activity (focused window / active tab) and is hidden when there aren't any related items. This can be a bit distracting, at least for me but it could easily be solved in the future by either implementing an option to always show Bridge Indicator or to completely hide the indicator and use Bridge from HUD only (if it's possible to use HUD with hidden indicators). That's because HUD can search indicator menus too, so you can already access Bridge results via HUD (they show up as "Related Activities").
Install Bridge in Ubuntu 12.04 / 12.10
Bridge is very new and under heavy development so you'll find irrelevant items showing up sometimes, but this should improve in the future.
According to its wiki page, the accuracy depends on the Zeitgeist Data-Sources you have installed on your system. These Data-Sources allow certain applications to notify Zeitgeist of their activity so not all events / activities will show up in Bridge. The Bridge wiki recommends installing more Zeitgeist Data-Sources from source - more info HERE.
If you use Firefox, you can install the Firefox Zeitgeist extension (data-source) using the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:markjtully/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install zeitgeist-datasource-firefoxsudo apt-get install zeitgeist-datasource-thunderbirdFor Google Chrome / Chromium, you can install the Zeitgeist extension from the Chrome Web Store.
To install Bridge indicator in Ubuntu 12.04 or 12.10, use the commands below:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bridge/daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bridgeOnce installed, Bridge will be added to your startup applications and should start automatically the next time your log in. To start it the first time without logging out/in, you can run "/opt/bridge/bridge-daemon". And remember, the Bridge indicator icon is only displayed when you focus a window for which there are related activities.
Report any bugs you may find @ Launchpad.
via David Callé @ Google+
