Re: Is beagle completely dead now?

[Joe Shaw <joe joeshaw org>]

Hi Adam,

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 6:36 AM, Adam Tauno Williams
<awilliam whitemice org> wrote:
>> A major reason why I gave up on Beagle and
>> the whole Linux desktop itself was due to this attitude.  I guess the
>> developers of those apps are more thick skinned or resilient than I
>> was?  I don't know.
>
> Time is also probably a factor, Beagle was AFAIK really the first
> desktop Mono application of any note.  It was also ahead of its time as
> a concept [I recall no shortage of long rambling posts about how it was
> useless anyway].

Indeed.  Writing a Mono application at the time was a... challenge.
Beagle surely had its own set of performance problems, and the tools
to profile and debug them were largely non-existent.  We even wrote a
few of them (heap-buddy, which has only recently been superseded by a
new built-in profiler).  I would have killed for a working debugger.
:)

When Beagle was started, the concept was actually pretty clear to us.
We weren't looking to create a Spotlight for Linux (indeed, Beagle was
first publicly demoed on the day Apple announced Spotlight) -- it was
really designed as a means to an end: Dashboard needed an index to
make intelligent queries against and get contextual clues.  Beagle
really grew out of that need, and became a user-centric tool.

Joe