Introducing Homerun

[Alex Fiestas]

On Tuesday 13 November 2012 15:56:11 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Tuesday, November 13, 2012 13:13:36 Alex Fiestas wrote:
> > On Tuesday 13 November 2012 11:21:34 Marco Martin wrote:
> > > agree on above points, i'm not sure how much mainstream krunner can be
> > > made
> > > (and yes, it has to be way more visible),
> > > even if the text field would be always visible or anyways easily
> > > reachable
> > > unfortunately a big part of public still needs to browse, don't know
> > > exactly the psychological reason, but that's what i seen over and over
> > > again.
> > 
> > People are used to Google and googling everything though but that's
> > something you do when you want to explore or to get NEW information, not
> 
> unfortunately, that is not true. that is just "geek wisdom" that is
> patently, utterly false.
> 
> it is a surprise to just about every. single. person. that i demonstrate how
> you can "search for anything" on your computer. only mac users are familiar
> with the idea, and then only for user files and a few other select items
> via spotlight (and even then, many mac users are surprised this feature
> exists on the OS they use!)
> 
> even plainly visible search fields outside of file managers (e.g. in system
> settings) are often passed by when people look for things.
> 
> so , no ... people are not used to searching everything. this may be
> generational, however, and "digital natives" may be more used to this.
I haven't said nothing that contradicts what you said on which I fully agree 
(I have mentioned in the past the exact case of osx users don't knowing 
spotlight).

I introduced the Google example because in the Web realm, even the not digital 
native search for everything and everywhere and those same people use 
bookmarks or other similar mechanism for their favorites.

There is an obvious reason why people had to get used to search in the web and 
it is its size. People are getting more and more data on their local devices 
so they will have to get use to search as well.

> i don't think the answer is to give people better solutions for bad patterns
> ("better hierarchical launchers" in this case), but we need to recognize
> that search is still not deeply internalized in the broader user base and
> design for that, e.g. provide mechanisms that gently encourage people to
> use search more often when available.
> > everytime you want to execute the same application you execute every day a
> > few times (you don't want to do kickoff--->internet---->rekonq everytime
> > you want to open a web).
> 
> that's what favourites should be for, obviously.
So we should make it easier to create and use them.
> > > (again, krunner solves this just fine)
> > 
> > Only for keyboard, and current Krunner GUI has problems listing big list
> > of
> > results.
> 
> krunner should not *need* to show long lists. the idea is that it should as
> much as possible show a useful result in the first half dozen or so returns.
> 
> other interfaces using runners to do the work may work differently as they
> have different use case targets. that's why we split data and presentation.
I know why we split data an representation... That much I know...

I have been trying to use KRunner as I use spotlight (since it has been 
mentioned) in osx where I'm a heavy user of it.On my experience (and ofc this 
is only my experience we should test this further) the short amount of results 
I get from my queries are an issue since I usually have to specify too much in 
order to get what I want. Another issue is that I can't expand the results in 
case I need to.

I have just done the following test in the osx box (where I have more or less 
the same data than in my laptop).

I looked for the word "webaccounts" willing to find a document I wrote for 
Akademy-es.

In spotlight I got:
  -a tgz with the code (email attachment)
	-8 txt
	-15 emails
	-4 pdf documents

The document I was looking for is within the pdf are of results.

This is just an example of it, if we want to show only 6~12 results the user 
will have to write more complex queries some how, in this case I could have 
done:

pdf:webaccounts
Webaccounts .pdf

Or something like that, which I guess is an option we should explore, but 
personally I find the human eye lookup in the 25~ items returned by spotlight 
easier than having to build a more complex query.