On Thu, 2010-12-23 at 12:55 -0800, Dylan McCall wrote: > Hi! I have a little itch to scratch :) > > A while ago I sent a message off to Gnome Shell's mailing list on this > topic, but there hasn't been much feedback yet. Still hoping to get > the ball rolling, so… maybe we can start on this here! > > It seems every new desktop shell promotes searching. In Unity, lots of > features are built around search, so it is important that it works > really well. Right now, the results for application search can be > pretty erratic, making it only consistently useful for getting back to > an application one already knows by name. It doesn't work for > _discovering_ an application. For example, Unity as it is cannot > reliably help someone wondering “how do I burn a music CD?” > We can do way better than that. > > Right now, in Maverick's Unity, a search checks an application's Name > and Comment field. So, if an application wants to be search friendly, > its developers have to cram as many relevant words as they possibly > can into its one-sentence comment. > If I search for “photo,” I get Cheese, F-Spot, GIMP and Shotwell (in > that order). > ”photos” gives me Cheese, F-Spot and Shotwell. > “camera” gives me UFRaw. > “photograph” gives me GIMP. > “photography” gives me nothing. > > I think a good solution to this problem involves the standard menu > categories attached to the Desktop Menu Specification: > http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/apa.html > The nice thing with this is most applications already do what we want. > Poking through /usr/share/applications, I can see most apps on my > system already describe themselves with good, logical sets of > additional categories, like "Game;Simulation", > "GNOME;GTK;Graphics;Viewer;Publishing;" or > "GNOME;GTK;AudioVideo;Audio;Recorder;" > > All this needs is that those categories be searchable. Right now, they > aren't, but it could be easy enough to create a centralized _thing_ > that links registered menu categories to natural keywords relating to > them. So, the Photography category gets “photography, photograph, > camera, image.” (Where we make an assumption that the search system > does partial string matching). > For particular cases, comments come back into play but have a less > prominent role. Perhaps a Keywords field could be gradually phased in, > but it would be less urgent. > > There are probably too many variables here to do something > particularly controlled like the card sorting exercise. I was thinking > about setting up a quick web app for people to match applications with > different keywords (and then to manually match those keywords with > categories). > Any suggestions for this? :) > > As for the rest of this thought: yeah, that's what I think would work. > I'm curious if we can establish some agreement on whether search > _needs_ fixing and how to go about it. > I would love to help with this where I can, particularly figuring out > that data set (and its localisation logistics). > It would be really nice to have something portable so we can still be > consistent with how applications are presented in different desktop > environments. > > Bye! > Dylan
Hi Dylan, two initial changes, that would already get a lot of conceptual clutter out of the way: remove the middleman. * once i click on something labelled "photos" or "music" in the dash, present no apps, present the appropriate content instead, managed in the DE's default management app for it. * use a semantic approach to data organization, enabling semantic search instead of sending out a string query. since "Run Application" was not available when i needed it most (testing Natty alpha), i installed Synapse as my main ALT+F2 dialog. Clearly enough, Synapse would be an enormous step forward, compared to the AIUI string-based search in Unity's Dash. I find *everything* with Synapse, and if i don't i can ask it to search the web for me.. That's comfortable! So one way of making search easier, is keep your room clean and tidy, give things a loical and natural order. Ontologies help with that, rich metadata. If rich metadata is implemented for say 3 out of 5 most popular media types, e.g. music, video and photo, the rarest case would be a user looking for an actual filename or URI, it would rather be all the way semantic search. _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana-dev Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
