Re: Idea: show potential apps in the search

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le mardi 12 avril 2011 à 09:44 -0600, Robert Park a écrit :
> Well, that's why there should be a static cache, perhaps updated only
> weekly. Store a simple list in a text file somewhere, couldn't
> possibly be any slower to load than a pile of .desktop files as is
> done currently. That way you don't have to query PackageKit every time
> the user searches something.
> 
> The only real challenge that I see here is making sure that the list
> of available applications are actually graphical applications. It
> would be a pretty terrible user experience if various terminal
> utilities or daemons were exposed in this manner, and then users tried
> to install them, and then can't figure out why "nothing happens" (that
> they can see) when they launch the icon. I guess you'd have to check
> if the package contains a .desktop file.
That's not the problem: the Ubuntu Software Center already does this,
and it works pretty well. But even if it's fast I don't think you'd want
to search for all installable apps containing the keyword.

First, there would be hundreds of matches, especially when you type the
beginning of a word; there's no point in showing installable apps if the
user is actually looking for a known installed app, which is the most
common case.

Second, that would slow the search, even if it only took half a second,
and search should be as instant as possible: it's like the overview, if
it takes a few milliseconds more, it feels painful and you don't use it,
or feel the Shell isn't correctly designed. And even if there's a cache,
you need to load it at some point: we don't want to make login slow just
because of installable apps, and loading it on first search would make
it really painful.

So I think the best solution is to have a button "Install apps for
$KEYWORD" that would be shown at the bottom of the search results, and
that would start GNOME PackageKit, Ubuntu Software Center or anything.
This button should also be shown in the Applications panel.

Regards