Jamie McCracken (jamiemcc) wrote,
2007-07-24 01:33:00

Tracker 0.6 released


Just released a new version of tracker which is bursting with tons of cool new functionality




As you can see from the above screenshot, we have used a sidebar to separate service categories (we flirted with tabs before but they were not HIG compliant). You also asked for a better GUI and more services indexed and we have delivered big time on this. All major services are now indexed (files, emails, chat logs). We are also leading the way to a semantic desktop with tagging everywhere.

New features:

* Evolution Emails (mbox/pop/imap) now indexed
* Gaim/Pidgin chat logs now indexed
* Applications now indexed
* New files indexed - all spreadsheets, csv files (these require gnumeric) and oo draw
* Vastly improved and new search UI using a sidebar for categories and a new metadata tile
* Tagging support in the UI
* New tracker-preferences UI for easy setting of prefs
* Tons of bug fixes - all major bugs squished!
* libtracker-gtk widget toolkit
* Now uses XDG directories
* Optimised triple store
* Handles multiple triple stores (files, emails and user data are all separate dbs for speed and safety)
* User defined and indexed data are stored separately
* New IDF based ranking algorithm
* XMP metadata support added
* Made use of async calls in UI to prevent UI freezing
* Added 60 second delay before indexing
* Added support for crawling directories without watching overhead
(very useful for indexing source code without causing slowdowns when
compiling - an often requested feature from devs who find tracker slows down their compiling when watching)

Its been a while coming but we wanted to fix all the major bugs and the new services (emails especially) introduced more bugs which took a fair bit of time to nail.

Apologies to the bugsquad who have been waiting a few months for some fixes to stop dupes coming through. I guess we will need to release far more frequently in future rather than take months to fix too much in one go.

Big thank you to the many and awesome contributors to tracker who have made this release really rock - Im confident its all been worth the wait!

PS Also dont forget our new config UI :



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  • 40 comments

Anonymous

July 24 2007, 01:07:01 UTC 5 years ago

Index delay

Does the index delay really need to be that fine grained?
Would someone really want to delay the index for 61 seconds rather than 60?
Would an option menu of
"1 minute"
"5 minutes"
"10 minutes"
"30 minutes"
"1 hour"
be more useful?

jamiemcc

July 24 2007, 01:15:51 UTC 5 years ago

Re: Index delay

yeah good point - i will bear that in mind for the next release

mighmos

5 years ago

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jamiemcc

5 years ago

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Anonymous

5 years ago

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Anonymous

5 years ago

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Anonymous

July 24 2007, 01:37:32 UTC 5 years ago

Thunderbird support?

Hi Jamie
I switched a few days ago from that "other" indexer, and so far I'm loving it. It's FAST!!!

I wonder if there's is planned support for Thunderbird mails. I also switched from Evolution to Thunderbird, and I really miss having my email indexed.

Anonymous

July 24 2007, 05:27:24 UTC 5 years ago

Re: Thunderbird support?

None was crazy enough to volunteer to write a morkDB parser and, IIRC, Jamie said it wouldn't touch it until Mozilla switch to something saner... ^_^


Andrea

jamiemcc

5 years ago

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Anonymous

5 years ago

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chaghi.pip.verisignlabs.com

5 years ago

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Anonymous

5 years ago

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Anonymous

July 24 2007, 03:11:47 UTC 5 years ago

UI Feedback

Congrats. The dialogs look very good and clean.

However please note that the border widths of the dialog contents need to be the same as the "Close" button (12px). Refer to <http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/design-window.html> for more info.

Also, the "Add" and "Remove" buttons in the pics need to have a spacing of 6px between them.

jamiemcc

July 24 2007, 09:14:04 UTC 5 years ago

Re: UI Feedback

Thanks - I need lots of these HIG violations pointed out

Anonymous

5 years ago

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Anonymous

July 24 2007, 05:32:49 UTC 5 years ago

tst All Files

Hi Jamie (and the tracker team),

congratulations on the new release. I look forward to using it myself. The new tst layout (sidebar instead of tabs) is much better.

A small suggestion from me would be to indent the "Documents", "Images", "Text " and "Devlopment", so that it is obvious that these things are subsets of "All files". Perhaps these shouldn't just be indented, but part of an expandable tree. I'm not sure if what I am suggesting is HIG compliant, but I think it would highlight the difference.

All the best, Forbes.

Anonymous

July 24 2007, 06:03:03 UTC 5 years ago

Congrats

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,

congrats Tracker-Team, that software is awesome!
I hope we get proper nautilus integration, rs.
A rhythmbox plugin would also be very useful i think.
Btw. would it be possible to branch tracker, in the next release-cycle ...

Anonymous

July 25 2007, 17:21:59 UTC 5 years ago

Re: Congrats

Search is already integrated into nautilus (nautilus has to be compiled with the --enable-tracker flag). The missing part is the tagging...

Anonymous

July 24 2007, 06:16:10 UTC 5 years ago

Index Kmail mailboxes?

The Subject line says it all.

Congratulations for the next version! It's good to have an alternative.

Javier

Anonymous

July 24 2007, 06:19:57 UTC 5 years ago

Congrats

Congratulations! Thanks for doing this!

I noticed that you have a preference for choice of stemming language. Personaly, I'm Danish, and about 2/3 of my documents are in Danish, while the rest is in English. So, which language should I choose? I believe the answer is neither :-) Wouldn't it be possible autodetect the language of a document? I remember an assignment I did in my first year at Computer Science at the University, where we had to determine the language of some documents. We could get extremely good results simply by looking at the frequency of letters. But I'm sure there are better methods.

Thanks again, for your hard work :-)

Anonymous

July 24 2007, 08:56:37 UTC 5 years ago

Re: Congrats

I wanted to chip in with my thank-yous as well! Tracker is really making progress. This version feels so much better than the last and I'm actually using it now day to day.

However, I'm also curious about the language stemming. My documents are generally in English and Swedish, but I also have a fair amount in French, German, Italian and a bunch of other languages.

Also, while I'm at it, it would be really nice if you could add the ability to use wildcards in a search!

Well, thanks again for this gem!

jamiemcc

5 years ago

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Anonymous

5 years ago

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Anonymous

July 24 2007, 07:21:06 UTC 5 years ago

Thanks

Thanks for the release!

Olav

Anonymous

July 24 2007, 07:29:27 UTC 5 years ago

Where's the release?

This might be a stupid question... but where can I get the 0.6 version?
Is there a release somewhere, because I can't find the source tarball.

Anonymous

July 24 2007, 08:08:12 UTC 5 years ago

Re: Where's the release?

Found it on mailing list. BTW you should add this two links on your blog.

http://www.gnome.org/~jamiemcc/tracker/tracker-0.6.0.tar.gz
http://www.gnome.org/~jamiemcc/tracker/tracker-0.6.0.tar.bz2

Anonymous

5 years ago

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Anonymous

July 24 2007, 10:14:00 UTC 5 years ago

Love the new GUI

I'm away from my usual computer today - so I don't get to try this out yet :-(

Some improvements to the GUI,
1. Put "All Files" at the top, i.e. above "E-mails".

2. I think the user should be able to select more than one category. I should be able to filter the e-mails AND chats, since I may not be able to remember if (for example) I arranged a meeting time by e-mail or instant message. This could be done using tick-boxes, although perhaps an "advanced" GUI would be better for this?

3. When there are results like "1-10 of 12 hits" I think tracker should just put it all on one page, since there are only two extra items to display. All the major search engines do this now.

All quite minor points.

Thanks and congrats on the release! I still think this is the most exciting open source project, even more than Compiz Fusion.

Anonymous

July 25 2007, 04:52:38 UTC 5 years ago

Re: Love the new GUI

1. Put "All Files" at the top, i.e. above "E-mails".

The thing is, "Emails" and "Applications" aren't part of the "All Files" total (they not files). This is why I suggested having the file items indented. Alternatively, replace "All Files" with an "All Items".

2. I think the user should be able to select more than one category. ... This could be done using tick-boxes, ...

I think we should leave this for the QT version ;) I like it simple.

Forbes.

Anonymous

July 24 2007, 11:17:03 UTC 5 years ago

"open folder" with custom command

hi,

thanks a lot for this nice tool! what i currently miss the most is the possibility to specify a custom command for the "open folder" kontext menu. i prefer rox, but there are many others.

jamiemcc

July 24 2007, 11:23:02 UTC 5 years ago

Re: "open folder" with custom command

We use xdg-open (in package xdg-utils) to open with your default file manager for whatever platform you have

I dont know what xdg-open does but it might be possible to specify an alternative file manager in one of the desktop files

Anonymous

July 24 2007, 12:13:47 UTC 5 years ago

Tagging?

Hello,

thank you for the release! What if I copy a tagged file to a network drive (Workstation to Laptop)? Do I need to tag the file on my Laptop too?
What if I move a tagged file to a network drive (nfs, smb, gnome-vfs -> sftp/ftp, fuse -> smbfs/sshfs/curlftpfs) and move it back to the Workstation. Do I need to tag again?

Thank you for the answer!

Bye

jamiemcc

July 24 2007, 13:04:54 UTC 5 years ago

Re: Tagging?

Yes - no easy way round that Im afraid as the tag store is local and ext attrs are not supported on network F/S

Anonymous

July 24 2007, 12:24:35 UTC 5 years ago

Great!

A long awaited release! Congrats to all the team. I will install this on all my computers asap!

Compilation error though here, Ubuntu Feisty. Related to /usr/include/libbonoboui-2.0/bonobo/bonobo-dock.h. I guess I need to update some libraries maybe. But the "./configure" went well, no error message. Just for your info.

jamiemcc

July 24 2007, 19:35:34 UTC 5 years ago

Re: Great!

I compiled on feisty just fine - make sure you have all dev packages for bonobo and other gnome deps

if you find out which one is missing pls let us know so we can fix our build system

Anonymous

July 24 2007, 12:39:52 UTC 5 years ago

Whoa

This release seems like a HUGE improvement.. Thanks!

No extra work being done to ensure that it can integrate better to the desktop? (Menus, panels, nautilus, etc)

The second thing what I'm wondering about is the lack of being able to index Gmail and Google docs :o That's where all the email is anyways, and most of the writings nowadays.. They must be indexed somehow!

jamiemcc

July 24 2007, 13:04:03 UTC 5 years ago

Re: Whoa

Tracker is already integrated into nautilus

Further integration must wait for XESAM (which will be in the next major release 0.7) so that all indexers dont reimplement the same stuff

Anonymous

July 24 2007, 13:23:46 UTC 5 years ago

Less is more

Looks like tracker is coming along great. Really hope it will be installed and used by default by Ubuntu, Fedora et al rsn.

Anyway, two quations about the UI.

1) Is the Find button really needed? Why not find as you type? (If there's performance problems a small delay could be inserted to search after no input from the user for 200ms or something.) If it can be removed, that's one button less to click and no loss in functionality.

2) Same thing with the left and right arrows. Why not show it all in the list (or as much as possible)? The user navigation would be much easier if there is just a scrollbar instead of two arrows+scrollbar to navigate the results. If you don't want to query all data for elements not shown? Well, don't do it until the user scrolls near thos elements.

Anonymous

July 24 2007, 14:56:11 UTC 5 years ago

tracker-search-tool Results

I'm glad to see that work is still going on in tracker. The improvements are very nice but the search tool seems to be having trouble in the way it interprets search terms and returning results for partial file names. For example, I may search for "monty" in an attempt to find "Monty Python.mpg" but get no results (note that indexing was finished, with the file's folder in tracker's indexing path, and trackerd is sitting idle according to tracker-status). "python" returns a list of files with the word python in them, which is expected but still no video file. Sometimes I even get categories that say there are multiple items but none get listed.

jamiemcc

July 24 2007, 15:14:22 UTC 5 years ago

Re: tracker-search-tool Results

Can you run stop trackerd and then run trackerd --reindex

(I have no problem with partial filenames)