Re: GnomeGoal for 3.8: DesktopFileKeywords

[Jeremy Bicha <jbicha ubuntu com>]

On 4 November 2012 22:22, Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com> wrote:
> We've had good success with 'adopting' a few GnomeGoals[1] as official
> targets for 3.6, and we want to repeat this for 3.8.
>
> And here are new goals that we want to tackle this cycle:
>
> DesktopFileKeywords - add a Keywords field to desktop files, to
> improve gnome-shell search for applications. This goal doesn't require
> any programming skills.

One thing that many module maintainers may be unaware of is that GNOME
Shell 3.6 no longer matches on comments so comments should be
converted to keywords. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/682529

A few months ago, I introduced keyword support to my wife as a way for
her to find apps by typing what she wanted to do. She immediately
tried typed in "crop a picture" which returned no results. Some of the
initial Keywords submissions (many from the Ubuntu community) don't
have verbs which I see as pretty important.

I also think GNOME Shell (and anything else that implements Keywords
.desktop support) should have a list of common connecting words which
it ignores. "a, an, the" is a good start. That blacklist should be
translatable.

Finally, I did a blog post about the Ubuntu desktop help (which is a
branch of the GNOME Desktop Help). I suggested that users type "Help"
into the Unity Dash to see the help. One of my readers doesn't use the
English locale and typing that in returned no results. I think we
should always show matches for the English name and keywords fields.
To take it one step further, it would be cool if translators could opt
in to a second language like this. For instance I suspect many
Tunisian users would like to see French results in addition to Arabic
results.

Thanks,
Jeremy