On Monday 31 Aug 2009 10:45:40 pm Timothy Falconer wrote:
Think ... 1000 projects and I have twenty minutes to try 5 projects ... I'm a 3rd grade teacher in the united states wondering how I could include Etoys throughout my school day.
500 different ways of saying 3rd grade will all but prevent that person from finding 5 great projects in 20 minutes.
This is a search problem that won't be solved with just tagging. Projects are not precisely structured records like database records. They are free form documents.
A few weeks back Yoshiki pointed that he found "EToysLauncher openPanel" slow because he had a few hundred projects in a folder. The method opened each project file to extract a thumbnail and collect them in a book!
What is needed to tackle such problem is an auto-indexer and search tool, say ProjectIndexMorph, that will index project collections in a folder (server) and display their thumbnails in a holder or book. It can have a filter field to narrow down displayed thumbnails and a refresh method to update the index when projects are updated (this can also be done automatically).
Now, teachers can search for projects that have, say "velocity", somewhere in their text morphs or meta-data. It will take no more than a minute to search 1000 projects.
Subbu