Normally at the N900 home screen you type a name and it pulls them up in your Contacts.

Imagine if this text search could find other things... like music files, or albums, or picture files, or web bookmarks...

Want to hit Facebook? It finds either a local Facebook app, or your facebook.com bookmark. Want to listen to Pink Floyd? Type that, and it pulls up Pink Floyd albums.

I'd even make this program find all contact details for the search string in the results -- so rather than touching a Name, and then a Phone Number, you only have a single touch between text-search and phone call.

Thoughts anyone? What would be the right way to implement this? Or has it already been done?

There's the scout program for that. It searches contacts, calendar and conversations.

I suppose that adding search capabilities for bookmarks, apps and tracker-indexed data (also e-mails) wouldn't be *that* hard, but I personally have not so much interest in that, and anyway no time

Perhaps @nicolai (he wrote scout AFAIK) could do that in 5 minutes?

Another must have is extended-contacts-search, it allows to search on all fields not only name

I'll admit my main use-case here is music

I guess the starting point is determining how the home-screen launches an application based on keyboard input. It obviously launches phone given number or star-hash input, and Contacts Search given ASCII input.

Curiously nothing happens when symbols like _ or & are pressed. Seems like a good opportunity to overload those keys for other functions, like a music search or a twitter search.

Is there a media-player command line that will open the album/playlist/song-search menu? Map that to _, and then I can type albums to my hearts' content and solve this issue without any real code

Might be a hildon-home mod+rebuild though, along with some gconf trickery.

How about integrating scout functions and other functions as mentioned above with App Search Widget? Mustn't be too difficult (am no developer (yet) though). There is already a way to launch App Search Widget with keyboard command.:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=83643

*Feature request for CSSU*

Also, does anyone notice that, for example, when I open File Manager, go to my Audio clips folder, start typing a letter, the searching goes all crazy and scrolls through the index of files starting with the letter I typed? Yeah, it's so bizarre, and sometimes it takes a while to finish listing the results after typing too. Another thing though is it only lists files and/or folders within that directory you searched but no further than that..

Wouldn't it be nice to have a more thorough search feature that searches throughout your entire system, picking up apps, contacts, filenames, folder names, etc. Perhaps there should be a search widget similar to TouchSearch widget that do just that. Instead of searching the web, it searches your local files. To make it more convenient, why not have that function in the TouchSearch widget itself? This all should work in real-time, the same way as how we type to search through apps in the App. Manager/Faster App. Manager and the Media Player/Open Media Player. Make that real-time searching optional too, in case it starts to lag.





// Roth