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General Software Discussion / Re: What is the currently best Desktop Search software?
« on: February 09, 2009, 05:28 AM »
@ qforce:
Nice piece of software. Looks like it is based on the Eclipse IDE (which is something I appreciate).
-Shades (February 08, 2009, 05:10 PM)
Yes, you are right. DocFetcher and Eclipse are based on the same GUI toolkit (named SWT), and DocFetcher is being developed in the Eclipse IDE.

When you make such software, how long will it then take for the big software players to gobble up your talent? So let them buy you out after some, enjoy life from the interest those millions generate. By know you are in the ideal position to not care about who prefers whatever.

Your mind is too many steps ahead at this moment  ;)
-Shades (February 08, 2009, 05:10 PM)
I never wanted to work in a big software company. I'm basically a (would-be) scientist who just wrote an utility to better manage his science-related resources and who then decided to share his work with others. And I do care about the needs of my users, because for me, Open Source is basically some sort of "charity".

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General Software Discussion / Re: What is the currently best Desktop Search software?
« on: February 09, 2009, 05:00 AM »
qforce,

What difference does it make to you what others prefer to use? Who made you the arbiter of what is right and what is not WRT search engines? Sounds like a personal problem...
-J-Mac (February 08, 2009, 03:23 PM)

I do not intend to be an "arbiter" or anything, I was just giving my opinion and wanted to see the opinion of others, in the hope that it will give me some important clues about the direction in which I should move with the future releases of my program. No personal issue here...

All these various search facilities in photo apps, music apps, etc. utilize different search methods - some use Regexp, some do not, some search filenames only, some search text within documents. I find it much easier to use a desktop search engine and become very familiar with its search features. For many users, trying to become adept at so many different search methods is a bother that they do not wish to do.

Most users here are a little more savvy than what you seem to think.

Jim
-J-Mac (February 08, 2009, 03:23 PM)
I still don't get it. Let me explain it with this example: Say, I get tired of my current wallpaper and I want to replace it with another, which had this cool sports car on it. So what do I do? Fire up my all-powerful desktop search app and type the name of that file? Well, no. I open my picture browser and click my way down the folder hierarchy to a folder named "Wallpapers", then I browse all the pictures in it until I find the image with the sports car. Why didn't I use a desktop search program? Because I didn't know the filename ("ColinMcRAE_xxx.jpg" or something), and when I saved the file, I didn't bother adding meta data to it (e.g. keywords like "sports car").

It would be very cool if the computer was able to run an image analysis on files like that in order to automatically extract keywords, e.g. "car", "sports car", "mud", "street", "race", etc. If that were possible, I could've typed "sports car" into a desktop search program.

So my point is this: I think (and this is really just an opinion), in the case of images and other media a hierarchical management system makes more sense.

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General Software Discussion / Re: What is the currently best Desktop Search software?
« on: February 08, 2009, 01:20 PM »
Have you tried the built-in search feature of Outlook?  :o  It's completely unusable for anyone who has accumulated more than ... oh ... 100 messages.
-CWuestefeld (February 08, 2009, 11:55 AM)
Why oh why do people continue to buy and use crap like that even when they know it's complete rubbish. Jesus... Really makes me angry.

For corporations it's even more significant (hello, open-source world: corporations really do exist). Obviously you want to be able to manage your own internal email. The bandwidth cost could be enormous, and more importantly, many organizations must guarantee privacy (HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley). And if they've got to have a localized client, then they can't rely on GMail's search.
-CWuestefeld (February 08, 2009, 11:55 AM)
Well, as an unpaid freelance programmer I do not really care about the enormous needs of big corporations (why would I). However, I do care about this: Do "normal" people really need super-powerful search programs?

Why force people to learn multiple apps? It might be fine for me; I'm well-practiced at such learning, and might benefit from targeted optimizations. But what about for my mom? I think it's fairly typical for people to think that anything they got off the web or via email are all "from the Internet"; how do you explain to such a person when they need to use which tool? (I remember trying to explain to my grandfather, as he was scanning genealogical material, when to save as JPG vs. when to save as PNG. What's an instinctive selection to us is befuddling and nonsensical to "civilians")

More importantly, it's impossible to compartmentalize mail vs documents vs media, etc. A huge portion of my email contains attached documents. And a non-trivial portion of my docs contain embedded images and audio. So if one is to effectively find all email that contain a document that has an embedded image, one needs to be able to handle the whole chain, all the way down.
-CWuestefeld (February 08, 2009, 11:55 AM)
Yes, but... images, music and video do not contain text (except for the filename and meta data), so the way I see it, it doesn't make much sense to use a desktop search program instead of a picture manager, a media player, etc., to retrieve these files. It would make sense if computers had reliable image recognition capabilities, if they were able to "understand" music, etc., but that's not the case.

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General Software Discussion / Re: What is the currently best Desktop Search software?
« on: February 08, 2009, 04:41 AM »
Hi,

I'm the project admin of DocFetcher, an Open Source desktop search app. I've noticed in several posts in this thread that there seems to be a real need for e-mail indexing and the likes, which puzzles me a bit. More precisely: Why do you guys need an additional program to search your local e-mails when you could use the search feature of your respective e-mail client instead? Moreover, why do you use e-mail clients at all? I, for one, use Google Mail, and am perfectly happy with its search capabilities.

On a more general note, are there any people out there who definitely need a desktop search app to locate images, music, videos, etc.? If so, then why don't you use your picture managers, media players, etc. to do that? Wouldn't that be a much more efficient and appropriate way to organize images, music, etc.?

I'd be thankful for any enlightenment about this issue.

Btw, DocFetcher 1.0 is (probably) about to be released this month and adds support for MS Office 2007 and WordPerfect.

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General Software Discussion / Re: What is the currently best Desktop Search software?
« on: November 11, 2008, 08:25 AM »
I assumed that DocFetcher would need to be placed in Start in order to keep the index updated.
Was I assuming wrongly? If I was, there is of course no need for it to start minimized. But if I was right, and it needs to start with Windows, then it really should start minimized, because I would never use it until later  when I have finished reading my mail, etcetera.
Sure, a checkbox will be all it would take.
Thanks for asking! :-)
-Curt (November 10, 2008, 03:04 PM)
Nope, DocFetcher doesn't automatically update its indexes when it starts. However, there are plans to implement a non-java daemon that will take care of the index updates, and that won't display any annoying startup windows (I promise!  :Thmbsup:)

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