Re: Searching for applications

[William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com>]

Hi,

On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 9:03 PM, Dylan McCall <dylanmccall gmail com> wrote:
> We're all moving towards searching for applications. Gnome Shell,
> Unity and KDE's desktop all promote it. However, I have yet to see a
> solid implementation.
>
> The Desktop Entry Specification gives us a Name, a Comment and a list
> of Categories. Right now, the search system in Gnome Shell appears to
> use the first two of those fields. Nothing seems to do stemming.
> If I search for “photo,” I get Shotwell, Cheese, F-Spot and Gimp.
> If I search for “photos,” I get Cheese, F-Spot and Shotwell.
> And if I search for “camera,” I get UFRaw.
>
> This is not good. People frequently use search for discovering stuff,
> even when they don't know what that stuff is called. Actually, I would
> bet people expect it at this point. Just having a Search box in Gnome
> Shell suggests that is the case, but it does not provide for
> application discovery because its results are so finicky.
>
> One solution is a standard field for Keywords, which could make a bit
> of sense. The really dumb thing now is application developers write
> their comments not to be helpful, but to fit as many searchable key
> words as they possible can. Keywords would fix that, so the Comment
> field could actually be used sensibly again. Unfortunately, that
> solution still keeps us with different applications describing
> themselves differently. F-Spot might have a “camera” keyword while
> Cheese may have “webcam.” Repeat for each locale. Pretty high
> maintenance.
>
> The categories in the desktop entry spec aren't bad. They have to be
> kept up to date (new types of apps may not have categories), but that
> isn't a disaster. F-Spot has “Graphics;Photography;GNOME;GTK;”. So,
> maybe this can be improved by populating search using the categories.
> Note that this can't be a direct one-to-one thing, especially because
> lots of categories have camel case names, like ContactManagement.
> Instead, maybe a particular category should map to a set of synonyms
> that are maintained somewhere central.
>
> That's my thought for the day. I'm happy to give that heap of category
> synonyms a shot if there is some interest; it seems to fit with the
> artsy stuff I find myself doing these days :)
>

For the control center we've just added them as _X-GNOME-Keywords.  See:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-control-center/tree/panels/display/gnome-display-panel.desktop.in.in

Jon