Re: Idea: show potential apps in the search

[Robert Park <rbpark exolucere ca>]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 10:06 AM, Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr> wrote:
> 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.

So, supress the package search until after the normal search turns up
with no results (or perhaps "less than 4" results, or the best
threshold here could be determined experimentally).

> 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 do it in the background, at a very low priority, *after* everything
else is finished loading. Or even do it at install time. Hell,
considering that most distro installations these days consist of
merely copying live CD images to disk, just get the distros to include
a basic cache in the default install and then there literally is no
processing time required *at all*. PackageKit could then be made to
update the cache at it's liesure (ie, when it's doing updates anyway).

> 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.

This seems more like the lazy way than the best way, and it falls a
bit short of Mairin's vision. I personally like the idea of blurring
the distinction between what's already installed and what's merely
installable, showing them in the same list with the same UI, and only
a minimum of differentiation. It would make it SUPER easy for new,
inexperienced users to discover and install new software.

-- 
http://exolucere.ca