In Praise of System-wide Search
I was just reading Jon Udell's Infoworld weblog, and he comments that he wished desktop computers had "a system-wide search service that works in a consistent Google-like way across all local app and system config data." This sounds a lot like the system-wide search feature that's been in Palm OS from day 1.
I talked about implementing this for my SXSW schedule app back in March, but I just wanted to bring it to everyones attention again: one of the best ways to make your app more useful is to provide a way to search through its data and make that immediately accessible to the user. If your app follows a overview/detail view architecture, its not too hard to make this work. If you have a big, ugly database, then maybe you should only search when you're the current app, but fortunately, Palm OS gives you the ability to do that because you know when you've been sublaunched as a new program versus just being called reentrantly by looking at the launch flags.
Just something to consider. The PalmOS.com knowledge base has some good recipies on searching that can help you get it implemented in your application more quickly.
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Copyright © 2004 Benjamin L. Combee
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