Saladin

hey, i just thought I'd let everyone know: I've got to much to do (personal problems, work, spotlight .NET...etc), to work on widgets, and what I have is too tightly knit together to be worth the trouble repairing and releasing. I feel like my brain's gonna explode with all the stuff I'm tackling. I may release the stock widget at some point, since that isn't too tighltly integrated with the dashboard bar and rest of the widgets, but that'll be in a while.

Yea, right now we're sorta seperated in development, thuogh we're working on the same prject. What I think it may come to, is that we each develop our versions, and merge the best of each version into one, since all .NET languages integrate very well inline (which means, in a C# program, you could add #ifdef "VB" (or something.. i forgot exactly how it goes), and then put loads of VB.NET code in there, which will be compiled just as if it were C# (due to the way .NET programs are first compiled into MSIL, they can be part of the same assembly). Rather than a string listbox however, which was going on in my teaser M2 build, my one has the results rendered by custom controls (meaning it can get 100% spotlight replication and nothing else). Tom, I would urge you to get it working rather than working against me as a competitor, since I would be very happy to merge the two of our programs once they are up for any sort of release (to give you an estimate, i'm on M3 and i intend to perfect the UI and release in M8). After that, comes the full mode, which i haven't even started yet, but will eventually be the way you view search shortcuts That said, if anyone can give me a zip/rar/whatever of the file type icons I can include by default, it would be very helpful in development.

exactly. I was just about to add a popup in spotlight saying you were a twit nah, here's a little demo I thought i'd ease your frustration with. Like I said, UI comes last. http://s22.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=3MMCDKD...TV2G7X9L5HQ2558 Instructions (please read carefully, these will be unnecessay when we get an installer... that's in beta1): 1) Unzip to a folder of your choosing 2) Run Associate.exe 3) Drag Data.xml into EditSRCH.exe 4) paste your security code in there, click OK 5) Now, you can run spotlight.exe, or see the really nice thing in this build 6) Right click somewhere, and go to the "NEW" menu 7) Notice that spotlight search shortcut icon? click it 8) Right-click on the shortcut you've just made, and click EDIT 9) Enter a search criteria for the shortcut 10) Doubleclick the shortcut to open the results EDIT: oh, and BTW it needs .NET Framework v1.1 (which you really SHOULD have)

tom's one was in VB, but he soon saw it was hard to develop into a true spotlight clone. So, he wanted to do it in .NET. Tom's currently learning .NET, so he isn't releasing anything. I was working with him, since I can program in .NET, and soon found I had recreated spotlight by myself (with lots of tweaks available to make it very fast). However, it used lots of memory, and was in the framework v2.0, so I decided to start afresh in v1.1 (which windows update makes sure you all have). I released a sort of VERY buggy version a while ago. I talk with ghostwalker a lot, and so he has quite a few builds. If you really want, I could show you what I've done in 1 day of work on spotlight (basically, searching and search shortcuts). The UI is the last thing that goes on, so if I do, it'll look crad. Tom's spotlight was ncie in that it worked. Unfortunatley, the engine wasn't flexible and used lots of inefficient routines to get results. With the .NET versions, we hope to minimize memory useage, improve flexibility and performance in terms of result retrieval speed. My one right now looks ugly, but it uses 15MB ram and returns results instantly. Even my old one with a 1:1 UI but poor mem conservation got the results instantly. .NET provides things to make this a lot better, like better XML implementation, multithreading, automatic Garbage collection...etc I'm not sure how tom's doing right now, but it'll probably take him a little while to get an efficient engine running.

Visial Studio 2005 Express Edition is free (its intended for students and hobbyists, so on release it will either stay free or have a very low price)

Well, I'm currently starting afresh (with v1.1, since the 2.0 framework produces unmaintainable code and is not convenient for most people). I've got loads of great ideas, and a good memory-efficient, instant search engine running including accessible DLLs for people wanting to make a finder with spotlight searching integrated. Porting it shouldn't be too hard, but with the workload I have at the moment, it may take some time. I'm going at my own pace, and it'll be released when its of a good quality.

OK, sorry guys it looks like MS didn't update their link to the BETA 2 .NET framwork v2.0, so here is the good link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=44381

no, but tom is reading up on VB.NET, while i'm developing the port to .NET we are working together on it. I'm just showing you what .Net can do with the popup search, which is all I've worked on so far. Unfortunatley, the UI is slowing things down a lot, and I'm having to write my own custom controls...etc to give best searching performance. Hey, but there's one thing to look forward to at least: I've just got custom search categories to work. Now you can define your own categories as well as the icon associated with that group and extensions sorted there! The memory load this takes is a little unfortunate (~30MB), but i'm working on it

ok, here's a preview of spotlight on the .Net framework. Please DO NOT POST BUGS FOR THIS VERSION. READ THE README if you get an error when deleting the last character in a query, simply press continue. This was a bug i saw after i had packaged it and uploaded it to YouSendIt, and i don't want to fix it until next preview build (Monday?).

Yes, it will use the default app for launching results. As for emails, the problem with them is that GDS doesn't give you any real location for them. For example, I search now and find an email result with the location as: "googlemail://testing new mail server". Of course, this can't really be used to get to the file. We can, however, get to GDS's cache of it and make it open in the default browser EDIT: Big speedup achieved. Unfortunatley, it uses 2.0-specific components, and although it could still be ported, that would require changing code i would rather not change. If anyone could give me the icons for the data types, that would be great (in any well-known format, really)

skin support is coming, don't worry. and spotlight dotNet is looking good. The UI is starting to lag the searching a little (but that's why tweakng is such a big deal, right?). I'm not gonna post it till i talk to tm next (get the file type icons and have a chat with him about whether or not he's gonna work on his VB.NET thing, since this version is entirely made by me.... I've got it totally customizeable, that means, text colour, tray icon, header image, header text, header text colour, item highlight text colour...etc All to be edited simply via a settings app I have yet to write, so far its editing the aw XML.

Spotlight dotNet is coming along well... the interface doesn't seem to slow it down that much. Summer holidays now (until 17th August!!), so I can really work on it. I'm gonna be looking at perfecting the popup interface, then we *may* see a prelim release tonight.

Yes, I know this, and so my version (which I may end making with tom, depending on how quickly he can finish his VB.NET book), will include a modular system - i.e. one dll that you have to include to get spotlight results integrated into your app! This hopefully helps with the feature that spotlight has to be able to work with programs. As for smart folders, its a GDS limitation - once its in GDS, it can be in spotlight.

ok guys, I'm thinking of making my own spotlight clone. Made in about 2 hours in C#, my version is extremely efficient and provides unimaginably fast search results.I can't believe how fast it goes! Its built with the framework version 2 BETA, and all it needs is the UI. I've overcome the problem of the tray button as well. The UI will probably slow it down, but i'll also ship a no-frills version which cuts all the fancy stuff to just give you instant searching. I'd put a pic up, but the dev-UI it has is so bad i think people would just laugh I'll release SOMETHING this week, wether its an instant searching hunchback or a 1:1 spotlight...

errr... maybe you should wait until that version is actually "old". Spotlight isn't a particularly difficult/complex program, and so I wouldn't be surprised if in a day or two we see a new build.