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Posts: 225 | Thanked: 81 times | Joined on Apr 2008
#112
Originally Posted by danramos View Post
The search is not perfect? The search, as stated earlier SUCKS. It's more than not-perfect, it's sucks more than anything that has ever sucked before. Whenever I do MY searches through this forum, I always end up going to a REAL search engine like Google and telling it to specifically search here. i.e. 'site:talk.maemo.org searchterms searchterms searchterms ...etc'

Searches done from the TMO forum's own search UTILITY is more of a practice in search FUTILITY.
So one thing I ask that people try to consider (and this is by no means aimed at anyone in particular) is that when you come across a post by a noob asking for help for something that should be fairly obvious with a simple search is.

1) The site search kind of sucks, and a lot of people don't know about searching a specific site via Google or another search engine.

2) Even if the OP is likely to be an ungrateful sob when you post useful information, try and remember that there are probably plenty of other newbies who will end up stumbling across this thread when searching (instead of the one with the useful information in it). A link, or even some tips on what exact terms or phrase to search for will end up helping those people a lot. Case in point. I've been looking for something like Instapaper so that I could take articles from my desktop and have them available to read offline later. I found a few different threads from people asking for this functionality, and those would have a couple of workarounds (but to me at least the workarounds seemed likely to be more complicated than they were worth). In these threads I also came across a competing platform that people were calling "Read Later", and that seemed somewhat familiar and I thought I remembered from my N800 days that there was a Maemo 5 app that worked with Read Later. So i started doing searches for "Read Later" Maemo and "Read Later" N900. Plenty of hits, but again more work arounds, nothing as simple as just pushing a button and going. So finally last night I break down and post and I get a post in a matter of minutes telling me that yet this works, and I should do a search, which I thoght was fairly obvious I had been doing since I bumped a thread that hadn't had a post in a number of months. Luckily the post also had the key piece of data that I was missing, the service was called "Read It Later" and a search for the correct terms quickly found me an app for N900 that does exactly what I'm looking for (Lukija).

But in all the posts I read on the subject, not one even hinted that there was an "app for that." Maybe the app didn't exist yet when the post was written, or maybe none of the people responding new about the app, or maybe they just didn't really understand the question...so it's nothing against the people who were responding (most of whom genuinely seemed to want to help). The only problem is that it seems to be the same way for just about anything you want to do on the N900. I want to do X. I know that X is almost certainly possible to do on the N900 since the device is so flexible...but I also know that it's going to probably take me a long time to find out how to do X...and when I do find out how to do it, the "solution" has about a 50/50 chance of being too complicated for me to even want to attempt. For instance, I'd like to be able to add a folder to my desktop. So before I even start I have to kind of weigh the odds and decide if this is important enough of a feature that I want to give up a weekend for. Getting NITDroid running so that I can use some business apps and no longer have to borrow my wife's Android phone every time I take a business trip probably qualifies. Trying to figure out how to change the size of the bookmark desktop shortcut under CSSU so that I can actually fit a couple onto the desktop...probably not worth the effort.
 

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