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Preview Of New Beagle Search UI
An anonymous reader writes "The new Beagle Search UI was merged into Beagle CVS last week, after being developed as a separate module known as 'Holmes'. A preview is now online with plenty of screenshots. It currently doesn't look as smooth or well integrated as Spotlight, but it does look promising and it is still in a very early stage."
the spotlight interface is horrible
Agreed, in the same vein as "all OS's suck, just that 'x' sucks less". Taken in the context of all available desktop search systems, Spotlight is pretty good.
Anything should be better.
I wouldn't bet on it. It's a really hard thing to get right. We're currently at the bear-skins and stone tools stage of full desktop search. Elegance in design takes time.
John Siracusa outlined the issues well
No he didn't. He critiqued Spotlight well. There's a huge difference. A Beagle developer cannot just use Spotlight for a while, read Apple's technical documentation, then read Siracusa's review and create a better Spotlight.
His reviews are very good. They tell you how things work, how they don't work, how they are inconsistent, and how they don't match his dogmatic ideals. What his reviews do not do is provide solutions for any of the bigger problems. They are reactive, not creative.
For example, he has this huge thing for a spatial Finder. A spatial Finder was very usable in the day of 800k floppies, and 20mb hard drives. Today, the spatial consistency of the Finder is not as important as before. He provides no solution other than to keep the Finder spatial, as before. The current NeXT-style Finder is a good stop-gap as we transition into huge hard drives with hundreds of thousands of files. The iTunes, iPhoto and Mail interfaces are very useful for their specific data types, but Spotlight is what's needed to bring the modern Finder to be as usable with today's requirements as the old Finder was back then.
So sure, compared to the "ideal", Spotlight sucks, but all desktop search systems suck. Spotlight just sucks a lot less. And Beagle (I'm glad it exists, and look forward to using it on Linux) is pretty sure to suck, probably less than Google Desktop and Windows Desktop Search suck, but will certainly suck more than Spotlight does. It's just the most rational set of expectations to hold.