How is Ongoing Development?

[danson]

Hi Kinook,

Just wondering how development is going on UR? Nothing released since October. Is the next step in the roadmap a 2.5 or 3.0 release?

Still using UR all the time and keen to know the product is still being actively developed. There's been a whole bunch of wonderful feature suggestions I'd love to have access to in the next version!

Daniel

[danson]

do answer the 'what next' question i found:
http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthre...=&threadid=993

however it would be cool if we had some sort of timeframe. I know it's useless to quote deadlines but what about a 'not before'? Eg not before June 2007 or whatever, so i don't have to keep checking back every day =)

[kinook]

We hope to release a beta for the next version by the end of January 2007 (final release within a month or so of that if all goes well).

[igoldsmid]

wonderful - sooner than i expected. Pls count me in to receive a beta download,

Thanks

[igoldsmid]

The V3 proposed new features look great. However, I don't see any changes to the search functionality? There was talk earlier of making Google Desktop Search able to index & search within UR - has this been dropped?

The thing is - many desktop search tools enable more advanced complex searching than is possible in UR (and for me and some others I think, are intuitively easier to use to construct complex search logic than with UR where I just can't get comfortable with the UR indenting logic and how it affects the search results) - AND provide highlighted search results, even in PDF's, Powerpoint's, Spreadsheets and so forth... So if one stores all those doc types in UR, as in many respects that is very convenient, one loses the ability to perform such advanced searches, AND in UR there is no result highlighting across all document types...

[kinook]

We investigated both Google Desktop Search and Windows Desktop Search integration, but neither appears to support it in a way that would be useful for files with hierarchical documents/data [1-4].

To also make your documents accessible to desktop search engines, link it in UR (rather than storing) or periodically export the entire database to documents (the next release will support command-line export to automate this).

[1] http://tinyurl.com/3yl4jx
[2] http://desktop.google.com/dev/indexapi.html
[3] http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/Sho...24234&SiteID=1
[4] http://addins.msn.com/devguide.aspx

[dasymington]

To reiterate the questions posed by igoldsmid:

What about "changes to the search functionality" in UR? Are there any planned soon? Will we be able to "intuitively ... construct complex search logic"? Or will we still have to "get comfortable with the UR indenting logic" (which seems to be totally unique and, to me, not at all intuitive)?

"To also make your documents accessible to desktop search engines, link it in UR (rather than storing) or periodically export the entire database to documents" ... sorry, if we've taken the time and trouble to import documents to UR, shouldn't we be able to search them efficiently without resorting to this?

[quant]

whats so difficult about UR search???

I like it very much, especially that I can combine "AND,OR" logical statements and create what I call "complex search". So far, this was the first soft that allows OR statement in the search I have seen. And this is maybe what causes problems, because no other soft has this feature and you never seen it before. If you dont use OR, everything is the same as in any other usual soft, you dont need to do any indenting! Everything is just AND statement added one after another. However, if you use OR/AND, it matters where you put the parenthesis (in UR soft represented by indenting), and it is good if you know some basic rules of Boolean algebra:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra

Does "Google or Windows Desktop" have OR? Could you for example find an item that was created OR modified yesterday?

Thanks

[dasymington]

Quant, I do know about Boolean algebra, but I prefer to write queries using AND, OR and parenthesis: it's much quicker and I find it easier to understand and to edit than UR's indenting.

Google does have OR, but not parenthesis.

Other software does allow OR, e.g., AskSam.

[quant]

Perfect then!

I agree that UR indenting feature takes a little time to get used to, and it could be documented with more than just one example in help file ... but once you grasp the concept of it, it's just fine, and powerful!

[igoldsmid]

Originally posted by quant
Perfect then!

I agree that UR indenting feature takes a little time to get used to, and it could be documented with more than just one example in help file ... but once you grasp the concept of it, it's just fine, and powerful!

X1 (yahoo desktop search) has comprehensive boolean and even much more than merely boolean - so does Exalead desktop search.

Apart from the difficult to work with query formulation in UR, the other major shortcoming is that the search results only point to documents containing the query terms - not the terms themselves - there is no indication of where the terms appear in those result documents - nor highlighting such terms. Therefore, as I said before, if you are searching for multiple terms - as in an "or" query, and UR returns for example, 30 documents as results - and lets say ten of those are 50-100 pages long - then you have to search potentially each of the 30 documents individually for multiple terms - try doing that with 'cntrl F' or handyfind without going crazy ! :-).

Therefore to me its plain obvious, that for searching - UltraRecall, is not ultra recall - its painfully slow recall.

Having said all that, UR is most certainly one of a handful of top personal information managers of the hundreds that exist. And I would like to praise the developers for their diligent and professionally managed evolution of the product - even though for me, and however many others, vital search functionality is not yet satisfactory.

[quant]

igoldsmid,

I was referring only to the (problematic) indenting logic feature of UR ... and completely agree with the need of highlighting inside items/files!!!

[kinook]

Enhanced phrase searching as suggested in http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthre...=&threadid=897 will be implemented in the upcoming beta.

Regarding hilighting of search results, we haven't gotten any feedback to our questions from http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthre...&threadid=2152, but we do have come ideas on it, and this will be a high priority for the next release (not the one going into beta shortly, but the one after that).

As for rewriting advanced search, it's difficult to justify giving this a high priority since it is already functional (if not highly intuitive), would not be trivial, and there are still other feature requests on the list.

[dasymington]

Originally posted by kinook
Regarding hilighting of search results, we haven't gotten any feedback to our questions from http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthre...&threadid=2152,

It looks as if both Eno and igoldsmid have replied in that thread giving feedback after your last reply. I didn't contribute any feedback because I thought they had already expressed the need for the feature.

What were the questions you were looking for feedback on? Other applications that seem to manage highlighting of found text are AskSam and ContentSaver. UR is superior to those in its organisational abilities, but since switching to UR I have missed being able to easily enter Boolean text searches and seeing search terms highlighted.

[dasymington]

Originally posted by kinook
Enhanced phrase searching as suggested in http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthre...=&threadid=897 will be implemented in the upcoming beta.

I hope this will be a feature that's easy to switch on and off. I don't always want phrase searching; often when I enter two words I want to find documents that contain them both anywhere not just as a phrase.

Couldn't you implement this for the search dialogue:

1. If you enter a series of words separated by spaces, find documents that contain ALL the words - as at present.

2. If you enter a phrase enclosed in double quotes, find documents that contain that PHRASE.

3. If you enter several phrases (each enclosed in double quotes) or combinations of phrases and words separated by spaces, find documents that contain ALL these terms.

4. If you enter words separated by OR (or phrases and words separated by OR), find documents that contain one or more of any of the words or phrases.

5. If possible allow AND and OR statements (which could be single words or phrases) to be prioritised with the use of parenthesis. I don't know how difficult that is, but given that you can prioritise in this way with UR's indenting method, it might be relatively easy to translate such search queries into UR's indented method and then run that; however, I know, I'm not the progammer!