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Preview Of New Beagle Search UI

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the i-still-run-a-desktop-search-in-my-head dept.

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."

6 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. the spotlight interface is horrible by John+Nowak · · Score: 2, Informative

    Anything should be better. I'm not going to get into details here, but if anyone has actually used it, they'll know how limited and clunky it is. John Siracusa outlined the issues well in the Ars write-up on Tiger.

    1. Re:the spotlight interface is horrible by node+3 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

  2. Interesting... by mellon · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm working on a somewhat more flexible search tool for Qt/KDE right now. I'll put up some screenshots in a few minutes - I'd be interested in some insightful comments about it.

    1. Re:Interesting... by mellon · · Score: 2, Informative

      Excessive reliance on indexing renders searching virtually useless. If you want to use searching to keep track of your files, you need to search quickly. Generally speaking, an indexed search will either find too many matches, or too few, because you can't do intelligent string matching with an indexed search - you can only search for indexed words, and of necessity the index can't store word relationships.

      For example, and index will have a pointer in it that says "acrobatic" occurs in files a, b, c, d, e and f. And the word "wombat" occurs in files c, e, k, l and m. So if you want to find the phrase "acrobatic wombat", which only occurs in file c, you're going to get either too long a list, or possibly no list at all.

      If the words you're searching for are rare, you can use an index to speed up the search by winnowing the list of files based on the search. However, if the words are common, chances are that most files will match, and so the time spent winnowing the file list via the index will not make any noticable difference in the search speed.

      My point is not that indexing is wrong, but that it can be (and almost always is) abused to produce results that aren't very helpful. Spotlight, for example, while very cool in the abstract, almost always fails to find what I need, or finds so many things that although the thing I needed was on the list, I didn't save time by using spotlight to find it.

  3. Not As Well Integrated!? by nathanh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is the submitter on crack? Beagle is equally or perhaps more integrated than Spotlight.

    To launch the Beagle search UI is a single keypress: F12. On Spotlight it's a double keystroke: command spacebar. Advantage: Beagle.

    Both Beagle and Spotlight have a single icon in the main panel that you can click for a search UI or to set preferences. Advantage: equal

    Both Beagle and Spotlight have a single search field that you can type into, hit enter, and see the results in the main window. Advantage: equal.

    Clicking on a search result in either Beagle or Spotlight will launch the appropriate application for that document. Advantage: equal.

    Beagle has helpers for mail, web pages, text documents, spreadsheets, image files, audio files, instant messaging, etc. Spotlight does not have the same breadth of helpers. Advantage: Beagle.

    Beagle is integrated with inotify which means it is aware of file changes as soon as they occur. The very latest versions of OS X can do the same thing for Spotlight. Advantage: equal.

    Beagle metadata is stored in the ext3 filesystem, associated with the file, so when you move the file the metadata moves with it. Beagle also provides a legacy database for filesystems that don't support file metadata. OS X does not provide a legacy database so you can't store metadata for files on filesystems such as found on removable drives. Advantage: Beagle.

    Neither Beagle nor Spotlight are integrated with any applications other than the Finder or the Finder equivalent. Some OS X applications give the illusion that they have Spotlight functionality by using the same magnifying glass icon. In fact, they are using a separate metadata database and their own search routines. Advantage: equal.

    Beagle looks ugly and Spotlight looks ugly. However Spotlight is the least ugly of the two though it fails a number of human interface design rules. Advantage: you decide.

    Spotlight has been rammed down everybody's throat when it's blindingly obvious that it was rushed for Tiger. Beagle is still an optional feature on most distros. Advantage: you decide.

  4. Desktop Search for KDE by WhiteFoxBR · · Score: 2

    If you use KDE and are looking for a desktop search application you should try Kat