Beagle Newsletter - 3 April 2006

["Joe Gasiorek" <joe gasiorek gmail com>]

Beagle Newsletter - 3 April 2006

Welcome to another edition of the Beagle Newsletter.  If you're new to
the project you can read up about it on our website:
http://www.beagle-project.org

Hacking
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Beagle Search Interface -  As of the 0.2.0 release, Beagle sports a new
search interface that was previously codenamed "Holmes".  You may
remember this project was started during an interface hackfest initiated
by Lukas Lipka.  The new interface removes the Mozilla Runtime
dependency and utilizes native GTK+ widgets.  In subsequent releases,
Dan Winship and other community members have provided many bug
fixes to the new interface.

Memory Consumption - It is no secret that in the past Beagle has, on
occasion, consumed far to much system memory when run for a long
period of time.  As this was certainly a large annoyance and deterred
people from using Beagle, it has received a lot of attention as of
late.  Joe Shaw, utilizing the mono memory profiling tool Heap-Buddy,
was able to track down several key issues in Beagle and Mono that have
been taken care of as of the 0.2.3 release.  Other improvements in this
area have occured recently in CVS.  Read all about it on Joe's Blog:
http://joeshaw.org/2006/03/17/386

Video Filter - Many projects, relating to the Linux Desktop, have been
focusing on video playback as a key feature for upcoming releases and
Beagle is no different.  A new filter, written by Alexander Macdonald,
has been added to Beagle to help index all of those Internet videos,
home movies and film trailers that are sitting on your hard drive.
The new filter utilizes the power of MPlayer to extract the metadata
and add it to Beagle's index.  Alexander has also created new filters
for GIF and XSLT files, which currently reside in CVS.

External Filter - Writing filters for Beagle just got a whole lot easier.
As of the 0.2.3 release, Beagle includes a special "external" filter that
allows for metadata collection by other applications.  If a certain
application already has a good way of extracting the metadata,
instead of writing a whole C# filter for it, that application can be
utilized by simply placing some xml information in the systems
external-filters.xml file.  More info about this type of filtering can be
found in the documented external-filters.xml file.

Stability - Along side the much needed work on memory consumption
there has been an overall focus on the stability of the Beagle daemon.
Bugzilla has be as active as ever as bugs are being squashed as quick
as they come in.  Great job everyone in the community for reporting
and fixing Beagle related bugs.

Project
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GNOME 2.14 - With the release of GNOME 2.14, three new additions
to the desktop environment have come with the ability to search your
Beagle index.  First, Nautilus now allows users to create new searches
within the file browser and save searches based on that query.  If
enabled, Nautilus will use Beagle for this searching.  Second, a new
panel applet has been included for quick searching.  The panel applet,
Deskbar, allows you to query Google, Yahoo! and a number of other
websites in real time.  If the Beagle plug-in is enabled, your files can
be quickly searched using this handy tool.  Finally, Yelp, the GNOME
help tool can utilize Beagle for quick searching of the systems help
documentation.

Dashboard - There has, recently, been a revived interest in getting
the Dashboard project running again.  Dashboard, the predecessor to
Beagle, was put on hold while a strong indexing agent, Beagle, was
created.  While the majority of the patches so far have been for fixing
various compiling issues, there is a renewed interest in restoring this
project with a well designed system to utilize Beagle's indexing prowess.

As always if you have any input to how the next Beagle Newsletter
should be distributed or what should go in it, please email Joe
Gasiorek at joe gasiorek gmail com