Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Could you give us the URL for the google so we can add a new custom search engine named something and use it?
The reason why I'm asking is that I would like use google.se instead of google.com.

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

What are the dimentions that the icons should have in order to be displayed correctly? Is there a chance that you would give us the chance to get the original icons so we can use them with a custom search engine?
(I have no idea on how to extract/copy them from console...)

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

The search url is not the problem... you can find it like on every other custom search engine.
e.g. for google.se the Url is:
http://www.google.se/#hl=sv&source=h...ef8f3a8f393d79

and the search query is: n900

But don't make the mistake to name the custom engine google! It will really mess up badly with the original google engine.

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

I just updated and now I cannot remove the images like before.

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

hey man, first off: thanks for this, I use it on a daily basis.

question: is it possible to add an option to choose either colour or black&white for the widget? previous versions made it black&white when opacity was lowered to zero, the current one doesnt, which is a little regrettable since it works so well with my desktop when b&w.

pretty please with sugar on top?

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Icon size is 122x40. However, in TouchSearch 3, adding custom search engines is no longer supported (if you've upgraded).

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Could you please elaborate? Thanks.

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Your welcome!

Ah, yes, I did remove the "Color" or "Ghosted" icon option -- but there is a method to my madness.

In TouchSearch 3, search engine addons are now supported, meaning you can go right to http://www.touchsearch.org/addons/ and browse and install additional search engines from there. I plan on making many more addons to provide more utility to TouchSearch.

However, this came at a cost: no longer can the user manually create search engines (this was always complicated, and could seriously break TouchSearch if a mistake was made), and I also removed the "Ghosted" option.

I did this because each Ghosted icon needed to be made separately in e.g. Photoshop, and was quite time consuming. Since I planned on making a lot of addons, I needed to lighten up the options a bit.

Sorry if this messes up the look of your desktop!

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

@ all:

I have only uploaded TouchSearch 3 to extras-devel but will be promoting it to -testing soon.

I'll make a new thread and blogpost explaining more about it when I do.

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Love the new enchanced search-option in the latest version. Thanks for your work on this great widget!

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

BrentDC:

thanks for a timely answer. can I get the "old" version somewhere? cause all I personally use it for is Google, Youtube and IMDB, so the new functions (cept the little pretty useful "choose your searchengine" stuff upon entering text) arent a big concern for me, Id rather just have the good ol' ghosted one =P

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Sure. The old version can be reinstalled like this:

• Remove TouchSearch
• Disable the extras-devel repository
• Reinstall TouchSearch
• Re-enable extras-devel (if desired)
• Don't upgrade when prompted :)

Additionally, the last version can be found here: http://repository.maemo.org/extras/p...t/touchsearch/

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Man - you gotta add the Ghosted back, I understand your reasoning - but 99% of people don't need all those extra features and most like it ghosted. KISS.

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Hmm. I guess there could be a compromise -- each search engine could optionally support a "Ghosted mode." So, this way, I would have all the built-in engines support it but optionally installed ones could lack the Ghosted icon and TS would load the default one.

A bit of coding to do to make that happen, though. I'll see.

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

that would be awesome if you had the time and will to do it =)

Im currently back to extras version, with ghosted, but now that ive had a glimt at the nice "choose engine for your input" addition, I kinda miss it =P

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Man, the latest update destroyed all my carefully handicrafted additional search engines. I had spent some time setting them up. It wasn't good. Please add in a backup script in your preinst script, please.

EDIT: it seems you did it already. Thanks, sorry for the above :)

EDIT 2:
I think your requirements for adding a search engine, i.e.
are a little bit too stringent. For example, I have several Italian search engines which I did setup on the old version, which wouldn't be accepted due to #3 (and possibly couldn't have mass market appeal as per #1).

Would you please fork the old version so that it can be kept separated from version 3, without being forced to partial updates in app manager?

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Hi debernardis!

TouchSearch 3 will not overwrite your search_engines.data information from version 2 so you should be able to safely downgrade without losing anything.

The reason I have these guidelines is because it takes me like ~15-20 minutes to make a search engine, and if I set the bar too low, I will be a very busy man :)

Other than not being able to add custom search engines to TouchSaerch 3, is there anything else that you do not like about it?

From a code point of view, TouchSearch 3 is vastly superior to v2. The file format that search engines are stored in is self-contained and well defined. This means that from this point on, search engines should never be "lost" and a search engine will almost never crash TouchSearch. The format also supports multiple languages so that you can, for example, select what language Wikipedia you would like to use.

Overall, TouchSearch 3 is a vast improvement over previous versions. Additionally, it is not technically impossible to add the ability for the user to make custom search engines -- it would just be a lot of work to simplify the process.

In fact, if you look at the search engines in /opt/touchsearch/search_engines/ you could probably figure out how to make your own without any instruction, because the format is really easy to understand. I just wonder what level of help people would need to do this? Just some simple instructions? A simple helper app with just the fields that the file format supports? A guided wizard?

Obviously, instructions are pretty easy to write up while a guided wizard would be a major job.

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

BrentDC,
I can understand where are you coming from with your approach to TS v3 - we developers all love our stuff to be nice, neat and clean, don't we? Nonetheless, removing ability to add custom engines straight from UI renders your widget virtually useless to me, as I would never make my little microb.php engine script to your library of shared search engines. Secondly, it doesn't seem to be possible to add multiple instances of single search engine, like separate wikipedia searches for en and pl locales.

As you pointed, users can hack your app and make own search engines fairly easily, but that's not what users would rather expect. I hope you could reconsider keeping at least the most basic UI for adding own engines. I need to tell that wizard present in v2 was slightly confusing, personally I'd expect only one field, like "Search engine URL" with example value of "http://www.google.com?q={query}" and that's it.

Btw, you say you need to spend 10-15 minutes to create an engine? So you add them manually? Or you have some sort of webservice that TS is using to download engines?

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

The new version just sucks big time and my old custom engines just disappeared!!! I want to go back! :mad:

Thx for the downgrade advice..

Really happy with the old version again!! :)

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

I totaly agree on that 2.2 just rules!:cool:

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

I understand. I never knew that adding custom searches engines was a highly used and depended on feature. After the firestorm in my inbox the last few days, I now realize how many people really loved that flexibility.

Right now you can select whether to use Wikipedia en or pl, but cannot easily switch between. I never thought about this aspect of it (being single-lingual myself, it wouldn't have occurred to me) but hope that is a relatively small use case.

I have definitely changed my mind on this one -- the next thing I will be working on is an interface to add custom search engines. There will need to be a few back-end changes, but nothing huge. I now realize how important this feature is.

I thought it was confusing too. I guess that is how I justified removing it completely: "Ah, nobody uses the add search engine interface because it is so complicated. I should just go to an addon interface and ditch the custom stuff..." were my thoughts.

I create the engines manually and package them up for download from: http://www.touchsearch.org/addons/

By the time I figure out the specific websites URL scheme, create an icon for the website (usually, at the very least, involves resizing and sometimes color changes or removal of those pesky white backgrounds), create the metadata for the search engine, build the .deb package, upload it to my server, and create a download page, I'm usually in 20 minutes at least.

I've already been inundated with addon requests. Maybe this system is bad by design? :) I'll be glad to the add-your-own-search-engine days. Let everyone fend for themselves... ;)

One last point for everyone: TouchSearch v3 has been uploaded to, and only to, extras-devel. Meaning that, this is a pre-pre-release at best. I only released it there so I could get a general feeling of how it is doing and find out what needs to be changed. I now know that people want the ability to add search engines and ghosted icons back. Thanks for the feedback.

However, keep in mind that version 2.2-2 is the current stable and end-user ready release. Any versions of TouchSearch that you install from -devel or -testing are just that. In active development or being tested!

When you see new versions of TouchSearch hitting your local Extras repository, that is when it is a recommended install. :)

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

3.0 will rule too. Give it time! ;)

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Maybe small, yet very important to many multi-lingual people. :)

As I said, adding new search engine should be really super-simple. I think many (most?) people know that search query is "hidden" within URLs, so all it really takes is asking for a single thing - an URL with a single placeholder for search query. Nothing really above that. This approach is also very unlikely to crash anything, because when people won't insert placeholder, all they would get is just running plain search engine not doing any search. I would imagine "Add custom search engine" wizard as a single-step dialog window which would take parameters like:

Name: (example input from user) "Google UK"
Search URL: "http://www.google.co.uk/q={query}"
Icon: [file chooser dialog]
QuickBar prefix: "guk"

Somewhere below Search URL field you could only add short sentence like: "Use {query} placeholder for your query".

What do you think?

Custom search engines in separate .debs? Woah, that seems like an overkill. :) I would strongly suggest creating a web service interface which TS would contact over-the-air and use to create these custom search engines locally. That should be totally seamless, done directly via TS interface and not requiring user to go "somewhere" and install "something" separately on the device.

Now, on admin side of the service, you would need to have some sort of web based (?) interface/panel to define new search engines. These definitions would then be stored on your server and be offered to TS via webservice I mentioned paragraph earlier.

This is quite obvious approach to me, as I work as web developer, hence I'd do it that way, but it's up to you how you want to solve it ultimately. :)

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Thank you so very much http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b4...arty/party.gif I now have my Danish search engines back!

Plus: I won't try out any new versions before I am sure that I can add my own stuff to TouchSearch (which, just btw, is an immensely useful app. :D )

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Hi J. M. Hanson,

In the next few days I will be uploading a new version of TouchSearch which will have the option to create your own engines. Unfortunetly, you will need to re-add your engines to TouchSearch 3 because the format used is not compatable with the version 2.2 format.

I already wrote the instructions for it, which you can see here for a little preview :)

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

BrentDC, thanks very much for this app, I use it many times a day.

I too have had to downgrade to 2.2 because I rely on my own search engines. I think they'd fall foul of your criteria because a couple of them are not very family-friendly ;-)

Looking forward to your next version!

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Hi,

i really like this widget, thanks for your great work! but i have a question:

is it possible to modify this widget? i don't want to tab to search, i just want the search widget right on my desktop, like this:

http://img3.imagebanana.com/img/2cs6...0817184945.png

tough the 'Search'-text on the right and on the top should NOT be there, just the search-logos and the text-field.

all i have to do is right something in there and press 'enter' to search. that would be much easier to use and no extra tab is needed.

is this possible or is that app not customizable like that?!

thanks in advance. :)

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Really love the widget. One request though, is it possible to have the widget appear on more than one desktop?

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

i still have the old version installed and use it loads...BUT i would love to be able to add 2 more search buttons next to the google one,prob wiki and amazon....is this possible?? i hope so!
here is what i have-
http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c2...126-192503.png

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Touchsearch 3.2-1 no longer appears on my desktop. It was working before the lastes update. No amount of rebooting, killing hildon or any other tricks work. It is listed, I can add it, but that's it. Not on desktop, gone from the list. Ideas?

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Same problem

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

me too...that wierd..

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

same problem here too, any ideas ?!

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

reporting in with another "not appearing after update" post!

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Hi everone,

I am currently investigting the issue. This is an early test version, so if you want to go back to the previous one, you can download it here.

As soon as this issue is resolved, I will make sure to let you all know and upload a new version.

I apologize for the inconvenience.

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

I think I may have found the problem. I have uploaded a test version here: http://www.touchsearch.org/downloads..._3.2-2_all.deb

If someone who is currently having the above reported issue try this version and report back, it would be very much appreciated.

Make sure to reboot after installation. :) Thanks.

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Anyone test the above-posted version yet? Results?

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

Hi all. Long time lurker, first time poster.

I tried the new fix, but the end result was the same as the first update,still not on the screen, and no way to get it back (at least as far as I can tell). downgraded back to 3.1 and everything is good again.

Funny thing though, in the about section, it is saying it's version 3.2 not 3.1. Anyway back to usable now.

BTW - Killer app. Was the first one I installed when I got my N900.

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

same as before

Re: [Announce] TouchSearch for Fremantle
 

I think I found the problem. I was thinking there was an issue with the code I changed but now it appears to be a permissions problem.

I'll try to find a fix it tonight. Thanks for the feedback.