Hi, It's been a while since we sent out an email detailing what we're doing, what our plans are, what all this means, so I thought now would be a good time to fill you in.
The big stuff: * Removal of D-BUS from Beagle If you've been hanging around on IRC lately you've probably seen Jon or I talk about this. We are completely removing D-BUS from Beagle because it is by far the #1 barrier to entry for our users. Also, over the course of Beagle's development the way it uses IPC has changed and D-BUS really doesn't make a whole lot of sense for our needs. So what we've done is use the very nice XmlSerialization framework in the .Net platform to construct simple messages that we're sending over Unix domain sockets for both client-daemon and daemon-helper communication. This work is nearly complete and in the beagle-no-dbus-branch branch in CVS. I am hoping we can work out the remaining kinks and get that merged into HEAD this weekend or early next week and get a 0.0.10 release out late next week. * New wiki The wiki is a great resource, but it's not a pretty web page, and a lot of the content is inconsistent and some plainly outdated. We've set up a MediaWiki on some Novell hardware here and I've started migrating a lot of the content over to the new wiki. The plan is that this new Wiki will replace both the Beagle home page (http://gnome.org/projects/gnome) and the existing Wiki (http://beaglewiki.org) and be the central home page that the community can help edit. You can check out the work-in-progress new wiki here: http://segfault.cam.novell.com/~beagle Please do not edit it yet or advertise the site. I don't want to take it "live" until a core amount of the content has been migrated, like all of the pages linked off the front page and the installation instructions. If you want to help with that, please let me know. * New Best UI This one hasn't been started yet, but our plan is to experiment a bit with the Best UI to see what works well and what doesn't. Obviously we'll be studying existing UIs like Google and Apple's Spotlight. Novell is setting up a permanent usability testing lab here in Boston and we plan to make use of it on a continual basis as we make UI changes. * New filter architecture The current filtering architecture is a little limiting in that for each "Indexable" object there is only one possible filtering method. This is fine for the majority of content, but in cases where multiple pieces of data are contained in a single object (think an email with multiple attachments, or a tarball) we end up doing pretty much nothing at all with this data. Jon has already committed a good cleanup of much of the code as a side-effect of his work on porting the index helper on the beagle-no-dbus-branch. Unless you're following the day-to-day development of Beagle this probably won't interest you a whole lot, but it will mean that things like PDFs in emails will be indexed, and point you back at the email when you do a search. Pretty neat. * Improving search results Beagle currently ranks results by relevancy. Unfortunately this relevancy hasn't been tuned. At all. So a large part of what we'll be doing is improving the quality of the search results. We'll also be adding other ways to search and sort, such as by date and by type. That's the bulk of it. These tasks are going to be carrying us through the summer. It's still too early to tell whether we'll be at a "1.0" release by then, but either way Beagle will be better than ever. Thanks, Joe _______________________________________________ Dashboard-hackers mailing list Dashboard-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dashboard-hackers