Notices

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

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/

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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?

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

Thx for the downgrade advice..

Really happy with the old version again!!

I totaly agree on that 2.2 just rules!