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.
October 30th, 2004 at 01:07
Looks pretty nice, good work. I think the action part is easy: Just what you do with files of these type all day. If it’s a mp3/ogg you can play it with your multimedia player, the same goes for movie files. Or maybe an edit button which lets you edit the ID3 tags of the file. And if you got a webpage as result, open it in the browser, and so on.
The tricky part is, as you said, when the results are persons from your adress book. The IM function is nice. Or send a new mail to the person, visit his webpage, or something like that.