Although, we need not implement the architecture first, it is always a nice thing to have a clean extensible design at the back in my opinion. Even if it is just as an idea. I do not think we should ever take a stance that Beagle can only work with "supported" applications (like GAIM) thereby beating the very purpose of choice and why we are all here burning our midnight oil. Beagle should be hackable and customizable by everybody :-) and any application should be made searchable if it wishes to by just telling very basic things like "Right Beagle, here is where I store my files. This is what they contain. Or here is a filter/function which can extract text from these. Atta boy, index and fetch them". The proverb that one cannot teach an old dog (Beagle's icon folks) new tricks should not apply to us anymore...
As for SIS, the version my supervisor has on his machine, it has a rich 'skinnable' UI (WinXP has it in the sidebar and viewing-by-categories) and is better than Google Desktop. It is a good baseline to compare ourselves to. Have to look at a preview of MSN Desktop Search Beta. Anyone tried that yet?
And I would really like the index of Beagle to be reused in various other guises. Like for example, what are the most "active" files in my system? Who is the most "important" person in my contacts? These are all possible to be gleaned from such a powerful index. Now that I have some time on my hands thanks to my teaching duties being over, I will make cleaner proposals. Honest.
---- Regards-Cheers-Sincerely, Srikant http://sriks6711.blogspot.com http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~sriks"There is so much conflicting information thrown at the masses, and most people only retain things that reinforce their beliefs"
-=-Sriksisms powered by Life, TagZilla and QOTD-=- Nat Friedman wrote:
Hello, I think there is value in being able to display search results in some kind of chronological fashion. The metadata research that you will find indicates very clearly that people tend to look for things based on two pieces of metadata: who ("I know Eddie sent it to me, where is it?"),and when ("I was reading about that last week, where was it?").So naturally it makes sense to be able to display search results on somekind of intuitive timeline.You can find a nice example of this in the Microsoft Research project, "Stuff I've Seen." http://nat.org/sis.png A screenshot of Stuff I've Seen in action. http://research.microsoft.com/adapt/sis/ Stuff I've Seen homepage. Their ideas aren't particularly original, and the screenshot is really horrific, nothing like the beautiful elegant mockup from Tuomas. But it is essentially the same idea you guys are discussing. Anyway, I think this is a general user interface metaphor, and we probably don't need a big architecture built up to support it. I think it would be good to try implementing it for IM logs and then, if someone wants to give it a shot, it would be really excellent to have a Best mode that sorts results in anti-chronological order. Nat