Re: Proposed module: tracker

["BJörn Lindqvist" <bjourne gmail com>]

On 1/10/07, Iain * <iaingnome gmail com> wrote:
> On 1/10/07, BJörn Lindqvist <bjourne gmail com> wrote:
>
> > I bet that the Epiphany developers does not think it is worth their
> > time if Tracker doesn't get included in GNOME...
>
> Then how will we know if Tracker is what we need?
>
> > But maybe if Tracker received a "semi-blessed" status? Not ready
> > for inclusion now, but scheduled for GNOME 2.20 (or even
> > 2.22). That would create a nice target for the Meta Tracker
> > developers.
>
> That again doesn't answer the "what do we want this for?" question.
> We seem to be shoehorning it in like we did with Bonobo 6 years ago.
> We put it in, at a very deep level, and then found out that it
> wasn't what we needed and that no-one wanted to use it.

I think there is some confusion about what desktop search is. I believe
that if you know the solution tools like Spotlight, Google Desktop
Search, Beagle and Tracker provides, then it is easy to see that there
is a real problem they solve. Let me try to explain why people get so
excited about it.

Image that you are Bob, the HR guy at a medium sized company. You are
in charge of recruitment.

Today is a normal, boring day at work. But suddenly, your email client
makes a "Bing!" indicating that you got mail. You open the mail and it
is from your boss Billy. It reads "Bob! We need to hire three JAVA
developers ASAP!"

Since you are in charge of hiring, it is your job to read all
applications and Curriculum Vitaes. The company you work for gets on
average ten new job applications each day.

You have temporarily stored all cover letters and CV:s in the
directory "~/Mail/Incoming/Job Applications" You have a big, fat TO DO
item on your list that says "Organize all job applications" but
because of time constraints, you have never felt that you had time to
do it.

Currently, there are about 1500 CV:s and cover letters in there. You
know that probably some of them are from competent JAVA
programmers. Therefore, you decide to browse through the CV:s and
contract the JAVA programmers to see if they are still looking for a
job.

Some of the CV:s are in PDF format, others in Word and some even in
PostScript. But that does not discourage you because you have the
excellent program Evince and OpenOffice installed.

So you begin to search...

*click*, *click*, open document, page down, page down.. No, not a JAVA
programmer... next document, *click*, *click*...

After a little while, you realize that it will take you almost forever
to go through all 1500 documents. You give up.

But what if you had Tracker installed? *click*, *click*, open Trackers
search GUI, enter "JAVA programmer" in the text entry and press
"Search". Magically! All 12 CV:s of programmers claiming to know JAVA
appears!

Satisfied with your amazing effectivity, you decide to take the rest
of the day off.

Another day, next month, you have a meeting scheduled with your boss
Billy. You have a bad feeling about it because you remember there was
something you should have done. Something you should have done as soon
as possible... You just can not remember what it was. So you once
again fire up Trackers GUI and enter "ASAP" and press "Search". A one
month old mail from your boss comes up as the first hit.

--
mvh Björn