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 :) Dylan _______________________________________________ gnome-shell-list mailing list gnome-shell-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list
