Instant Search on N900
 

Hi,

I have bought a Nokia n900 recently and I am new to this community. Can anyone tell me how I can search in my device? something like windoes7 instant search.


thanks

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

As Far As I Know, there is no "global search" on n900.

Each app has its own search function, like Contacts or Conversations

Usually you open the app and start typing with the hardware keyboard and some kind of search will occur

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

Asking the other way round: What would you like to search for, and why?

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

theres a search app, but it does nothing 4 me

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

I'm guessing nargess is thinking also of (for example) a Google Desktop type search. A quick use-case scenario I thought up:

You're meeting a group of friends but you're going to be late and the guy organising it isn't in your contacts list. You don't remember if you got his details in an SMS, email, calendar invite, etc. On the iPhone (much as I hate to make this kind of comparison - I don't think they're usually helpful), you swipe to the left-most desktop and start typing his name. Instantly, every item on the phone is displayed with that text in it - every SMS, calendar entry, email, note, etc. Clicking the item opens it in the native app.

Before I ditched the iPhone for the N900, I used this a few times a week so I can definitely see the attraction.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

its not only an iphone thing, its more like the "new generation interface" standard, that maemo (so nokia) doesnt have the time to do.

maybe there will be an 3rd party app someday.

but AFAIK there isnt something like full device search in N900.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

Totally agree, I'm familiar with the iPhone so that was the example I used.

Incidentally, on the N900 there's no reason why such a search should be limited to contacts, emails, SMS - we've got a proper filesystem so let's use it!

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

rivierakid,

Do you mean?

find . | xargs grep 'string' -sl

? Half Joking

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=44065

Though if you plan to install it, disable extras-devel after that.

It doesn't search *in* the files though. Tracker has disabled this function by default (and in mails and contacts too).

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

:) Yeah, that'd do it...

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

Device search is as old as the hills but I'm afraid the Maemo team don't believe in Search much at all. Symbian has had in device search (coupled with Web search) for some time but every time this is raised for Maemo, someone from the the developers answers with why do you want to search, where do you want to search etc.

Same applies for Contact Search. They don't get it that you might want to search for a company name, a phone number, an address.

No, for Search, look on every other OS, but not Maemo. Oh no. We don't do prosaic, useful things like that.

Sorry, but when I see "Asking the other way round: What would you like to search for, and why? ", I get really mad. It's so glaringly obvious why people want to search and every OS has the answer.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

Hi All friends,

Sorry for not being able to check your kind replies for some days. Actually my major problem right now is that I have downloaded some applications such as MPLAYER and WORLDTV but I don't see them in the application list, i want to search for them on my phone...

I can see them in the uninstall list, but I can't find them and open them.

I will be thankful if s/o can help

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

I believe the mplayer app is command line only so you should be able to open it up from there if you have the know how. Good Luck.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

I totally agree with you, I mean for gods sake why on earth would people even question the need for a global search facility. its so obvious.

Sometimes a user wants to search for connected material based on the vagueness of a word but they may not have all the detail. get it?

Example. on my n95 i used to use the global search regularly to search for a picture of the london underground. I could never remember where I filed it on the filesystem so i used the global search. If there was no search i would never have found it as I would be somewhere in the gallery as well as the other 2000 odd pictures. Get it yet?

There is a search facility on the n900 which someone has written but it does not go into file content to search for the search string.

When you have a device that is capable of storing mass amounts of data there should always be a global search option as data piles up and one cannot always remember where the data lives.

I dont see why a user should have to shell out to terminal and type command line syntax just to find a document.

I know the n900 is aimed at the hacker community and development community and its definitely not for the avergae joe but this really is ....quite frankly a pain in the !@£$.

Developers could probably knock this app up in 20 minutes.

If I were a developer or I had the time to learn hell i would do it myself.

Honeslty "why do we need a global gui search utility ? " ....come on now isn't it obvious.....answer. I dont want to type in code to find a file or it's contents!

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

Neither of those will show up in the application list - MPLAYER is command-line only, and WORLDTV is just a set of internet streaming URLs for use with KMPLAYER (which it should have installed automatically).

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

I would go a little further and insist on *instant* search a la Google Desktop, not just a front-end to the 'find' command. If I'm looking for something it's because I want it now, not in five minutes once 'find' has scanned the entire filesystem.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

I question it because I know where I put my stuff and I don't want the overhead of a process that has to index everything I put on the device and keep it up-to-date. My battery life is crap enough already & my N900 lags plenty as it is.

Application-level search (in email, lists of mp3s etc) is fine and necessary. I don't want an extra layer on top of that.

I don't object to having it available if other people are less organised than me, but personally I would disable it given the choice.

Hope that helps you see the non-obvious :p

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

I also forgott o say that.... forexample I have a word file and I don't remember now where and in which folder I have saved this file.... how should I find it on Nokia N900?

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

I think this is an app that should be included in the standard firmware release.

Can I get an Amen.....

Can I get some support on this....?

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

so this does work? i tried it and could never find anything

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

FYI there have been a change of policy with those CLI etc packages and that shouldn't happend in the future without you knowing that the stuff you are installing doesn't create icons etc.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

All the app does it find filenames

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

The app is included (tracker) - it's just that full text indexing has been specifically disabled (I believe it was present in early builds). Presumably there were reasons for doing that (probably performance related, but it could be due to issues with plugins for specific file formats). Your best bet is probably to open a feature request in bugzilla to request this gets re-enabled. After that, an interface would be pretty straightforward to implement. At the least we'd hopefully get an explanation for why it was disabled in the first place.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

thanks for the advice Rob1n, I will attempt to open it in bugzilla as I have never requested anything from there before..

Cheers

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

Not that much performance related, more like battery. Full text indexing tends to occupy lots of resources and even using 10% in background it will still suck your battery dry.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

Anyway I totally agree that we NEED a global search tool.
With such a powerful device like N900 with pleny of storage it should be quite obvious to have one program like that.

For battery usage we could implement an option to index only when connected to the power/USB cable.
But other OS/phones (like Iphone) have found the solution.
Indeed it is really strange that there is no Linux good search app like google desktop on windows platform and that no Guru programmer have coded something similar (even not so fast).

More over I don't understand why we don't take full use of the internal DB where are stored email, sms, contacts etc, making also a local search much more complete (example in company, notes field etc). We need more option to fully configure how and where we want to search.

So, at the end , PLEASE NOKIA IMPLEMENT THIS FUNCTION BETTER and AS SOON AS POSSIBLE !!

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

Hmmm. I can't believe that normal usage case (just from my hat) for indexing would occupy lots of resources. For first run surely, but if you put 5 documents and couple of songs daily. Instead lets say that you put 50 documents/emails daily and 100 songs then it could be problem.

I have no idea about this but workaround could be that tracker is launched for resource heavy content only if battery level is high enough (screen off low cpu) or if device is charging.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

aren't there standard linux solutions for the power drain problem? i'm pretty sure that tracker on laptops doesn't index when it's on battery power.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

for that matter, the machine where the index is built need not be the same machine that hosts the query client. one should be able to copy data from the tablet to a pc, index on the pc, copy the indexes back to the tablet, and then run searches on the tablet.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

Probably not. The reason full text search is not enabled and why copying and pasting the index won't work may be that N900 is using version 0.6 of Tracker where a lot of features are missing (probably optimizations too) one of the biggest is SparQL. Desktop Linux has already moved to 0.7 (at least mine).

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

i would at least like to search my emails. =)

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

Brainstorm anyone? What kind of contents need to be searched, e.g. files, file metadata, emails, SMS, IM etc... How to implement indexing, and what kind of search interface to provide? Should the search results be filtered by type of the content, size, date range etc. How to open the specific search results, is it possible to jump to certain SMS or email?

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

Why not first look at how search is implemented on iPhone, Symbian, Android, WebOS etc and then take it from there?

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

Totally agree - Apple has it with iPhone and it's quite frankly possibly the *best* iPhone feature. How can Apple have found a way for instant search without killing the battery and the collective might of the open source community haven't?

It's not rocket science - the initial index is OK to max out the CPU. Thereafter, monitor the filesystem with inotify (or whatever the Maemo equivalent is) such that any writes will be spotted and indexed regardless of where. Contacts, SMS, Calendar, etc don't need to be actively indexed since their databases can be queried directly.

The only overhead in normal use will be when other apps are writing, and even then it can be minimised.

There is really no reason why instant search should be such a big power drain. The real problem is that everybody is accustomed to desktop applications where CPU time is essentially unlimited, and power limits simply don't exist. When it comes to mobile platforms, too many people assume the limitations mean it can't be done. The N900 is more powerful and with a better battery (in my experience as an ex-iPhone owner) than the iPhone yet Apple managed it, so why can't we?

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

It's also possible that all data pushed to device using iTunes is indexed by the the iTunes itself.

I guess for N900 the existing tracker is a good tool, but there's no point running two similar processes for global search and media indexing that already exists. Tracker has quite nice support for indexing file contents of different types of files. I have no idea how to add support for e.g. emails. Another issue is the somewhat outdated version of current tracker.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

I agree it's possible the initial index may be performed by iTunes, the iPhone absolutely does search across new content. Of course, Calendars, Contacts, Notes, SMS, etc are all in sqlite databases on iPhone so yeah - there's very little "indexing" as such, but then that just makes it all the more egregious that the N900 has nothing by default for the same things.

Like I say above, extending this to the entire filesystem via inotify really shouldn't be such a big problem, although I don't agree that indexing should not occur while on battery - it's a mobile device that spends over 75% of it's time on battery. You need to be able to index those items you receive (when you receive them) while on battery too.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

What is lost if SPARQL is not used? Is the search from index missing the information provided by ontologies, or is this already lost when indexing.

One good question is that what kind of indexing is used in Meego? Moblin uses Bickley for indexing and providing search API.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

True, but you've implicitly assumed a much more complicated application. Rather than run a periodic sweep that simply scans files for strings, you have to first see that something has been changed (for all applications, however they store their data), and then index these changes. Oh, and remove the old references.

Editing the a contact and fixing Fred's last name, as you had incorrectly typed Fluntstone when you meant Flintstone, means that you have to have a model of individual records inside the contacts database, and be able to track down and remove all the old references. The app may not edit in place after all, Fred's new record number could be 123599, with the old record at 12012 marked as simply marked as old. Otherwise the othe fields ("Note: wife's name Wilma") that weren't changed would turn up Fred's old record.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

Finding that something's changed is pretty trivial - there's notification functionality built into the kernel (I think inotify is the current one, but it's been a while since I played with that).

As you say, that's more complex, but is what you really ought to be doing anyway - simple string-based searching is going to fail for an awful lot of file formats (due to compression, binary formats, etc), so the indexer will need to know how to read the appropriate data from different file formats (for example, you can see that tracker already knows how to deal with ID3 tags in music files).

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

well anyway, actual problem boils down to the root cause, why tracker has file contents functionality disabled. It worths creating a bug, so that to see if that is realistic feature to expect.