tigert.com | my life and stuff um, what do I write here?

Beagle stuff, take #2..

So I have been pondering the search results of "best" - the beagle search tool. You probably know that Beagle has several "plugins" to search different file types, your email, it indexes the websites you visit, the instant messaging logs from Gaim and so on.

Now, when you search for something, it will roam through all these indexes and then presents you a bunch of results that match the search criteria. Potentially hundreds. What would be most useful in my opinion is to work like Google: Just have a way to "score" the hits so that among the first ones on the list most likely is the one you are looking for. I am pretty sure this is what the guys are working on already, thus I was concentrating on the user interface part. Those who built Beagle from CVS, have no doubt noticed something I have been doing. Basically, thanks to Dave, it now uses Gecko for rendering the results, I did some nice stylesheet work (just dont look at the css file, it is probably ugly ) and I pondered some more. This is what I came up with:

This is a generic example - beagle can do customized stuff too for each item type, but I think it makes sense to have the generic layout be similar for all of them, it makes it easier to scan through when you are looking for something. Build beagle from CVS and play with it. It's not fully done yet, it has some issues, but you should get the idea. And it currently still groups the results by type rather than does the scoring, but anyhow. Oh, and you need CVS gecko-sharp if it crashes when you click links.

So, currently we support indexing the following things: RSS feeds from Blam! , Word, Openoffice, Powerpoint, PDF, HTML, RTF, text files, mp3/ogg, several types of source code and images (it parses EXIF etc) - now the tougher part: What should each file/item type have on the "Actions" -part? That's what is left for me to ponder about next. For every item that is associated to a person (chatlog, mail, blog entry etc) one at least wants to have a "Send instant message" -link if the person is online. But there could be other useful things too. Ideas are welcome..

And what information should be visible from each item type? At least the date the file was modified or a mail was received (yea, even my mockup misses this) or a chat was logged, but maybe other things too? For files, I think showing the folder the file is in (and ability to also open the parent folder) is good. Maybe image dimensions etc..

Oh btw, to fight blog spammers (man, I thought email spam was the lowest form of life...) I have installed a plugin to automatically close 3 weeks old posts from commenting. Idiots. I dont have anything else to say.

Evolution: Best vfolder rule ever!

So Ben-who-has-no-blog and I discussed a feature I have wanted for Evolution for a long time: in threaded view, when one sorts by date received, Evo should consider threads age by the newest message in the particular thread.

Currently on Evolution I am unable to use the threaded view, since my inbox is huge, and when someone replies to a thread that started a long ago, it will be way down on the list, and I very often just miss it. Thus I had to use non-threaded vie, and it sucked too since following discussion is so hard that way.

So turns out this is neat:

What it does, is it matches all mails that have been received after a certain time, and includes the whole thread. Now just sort the mailbox by "date received" or something. It doesnt exactly do what I want, but since it includes only those threads and messages that have new messages since, say, 2 weeks ago, the list is a lot smaller and thus easier to scan through. Of course 95% of it is spam, but that is a whole different problem

For the record, my Junk folder has 14777 messages, I purged it 2 months ago. That stuff luckily got filtered out of my inbox, but I still get more than enough there. Anyone remember when it was a joy to receive email?

Garrett: I bet the Hasselblad makes a real manly "ka-chunk!" shutter sound too! Nothing like the wimpy Canon D20 Mig has.. ;^)

5 years.. I can’t believe it..

Nat stole the show already, but still I am going to put this up, since I at least hope I have other friends too who read my site but do not visit planet gnome..

It's been 5 years since Ximian, then Helix Code, or um, initially International Gnome Support was founded by Nat and Miguel.. Those crazy guys.. All I can say is: Thanks for the ride, it's been such an interesting time really.

I'm really looking forward to the future as well!

Jimmac. You need comments on your blog!

Dude, so many good thoughts and mockups lately on your blog.. I must comment, but I have no mouth!

Anyway, I'll do it via planet gnome then

I liked your idea of maintaining a "gallery" structure inside f-spot so you could set your web gallery up offline, like on the plane when you return from a trip - and then "sync" it to the web when you go online the next time.

We could indeed check if the web server supports PHP or such, f-spot could upload a test script and see if it works etc. Then if PHP is usable, we could upload automatically a web gallery script to the users homepage, in photos/ or something. This could be based on Jakub's Original. If the web server does not support PHP, then F-Spot should just generate a static web gallery and sync it over when changes are made locally. This could be transparent to the user - all they see is their pictures on the web.

The advantage with PHP is the thumbnailing and such could be done on the server too, saving some bandwidth and time when one doesnt need to upload all images in thumbnail, medium and possibly even large size.