yaBi - beagle search client

yaBi (Yet Another Beagle search Interface) is a python-kde-beagle search
interface to find information from beagle.

yaBi uses snappy KHTML to display results, CSS for designing and super-fast
beagle-python bindings to retrieve search results. It uses kde preview service
to display thumbnails and also shows kde-associated applications for results.

To run, download the file,
$ tar zxvf yabi-0.6.1.tar.gz
$ cd yabi-0.6.1
$ ./yabi.py

(Help Wanted: Packaging python applications)
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Features:
* Separation of search results into categories like Music, Pictures, RSS, Webhistory, Other files, Mails etc. and showing them in different tabs.
* Summary tab to show the time taken to query, search result summary.
* Formatting of search result done using CSS (and some javascript). Change yabi.css and yabi.js to suit your taste.
* Shows indexed information about results e.g. time when indexed, full path, title (if any), sender (if mail) etc.
* Shows relevant actions (according to the users KDE associations) and standard actions like open in terminal, reveal in konqueror, send as email-attachment.
* Shows thumbnail (on-demand, as thumbnail generation can be slow for certain files).
* Retrieves snippets from beagle in background and displays them when requested.
* Clusters webhistory results into websites and emails into conversations. This helps a lot when the user knows what website/email-conversation might be of interest.
* User can use keyword queries to search specific metadata like extension or sender email-address. Also, allows various specifiers to restrict query by dates, source, type etc.
* It should be clear by now that beagle allows an elaborate query syntax to fetch you just the information you need. There is a easy-accessible help tab which explains the syntax in great detail.
* Information tab to show current beagle status and index information.
* Allow starting/stopping of beagle daemon from the GUI.
* Save queries in bookmarks.

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Requirements:
* beagle >= 0.2.0 with libbeagle and python-bindings enabled
- (libbeagle and python-bindings require glib-2.6-devel, libxml-2.6.19-devel and pygtk2-2.6-devel)
* PyKDE (I used Oct-13-2005 snapshot)

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About Beagle:
Beagle is a utility to comb personal data which can be used to find whatever
you are looking for. Beagle in itself doesnt have a GUI (so its not correct to call it a gnome-application). It provides
C/C#/python api for clients.
beagle-0.2.1 provides a build option (./configure --disable-gui --enable-libbeagle --enable-python ...) which builds core beagle with python bindings.

Besides searching among files, beagle can also store information about
* kopete chat sessions
* akregator (pre kde-3.5) rss feeds
* kmail emails konqueror
* webbrowsing history
Writing plugins for beagle is fairly simple, for information on that and more, visit http://beagle-project.org/Main_Page

If you dislike some feature, have any suggestions, hate my python coding style or have fixes for bugs (I am sure there are many), please email them to me at dbera.web_NOSPAMat_gmail.com. If you are a CSS/UI expert, then I would love to hear your suggestions.

v 0.6.1 (Feb 2, 2006):

* Fixed a crash in snippet retrieval which also fixes a memory leak
* Explicitly deny documentation and IM queries since we dont have any means of displaying them

v 0.6 (Jan 31, 2006):

* Feedback from Joel, changed UI, removed unneeded items
* No need to display unnecessary information in the hits
* Some CSS fixes and changes
* Fixed a bug when no results were returned for some query and next query would block
* Added "bookmark" feature to save query
* Added "source", "type" selection lists (they dont work due to a bug in Beagle)
* Added ability to start/stop beagle from yaBi
* Use passive-popup to inform the user when query finishes
* General code cleanup
* Improve summary presentation
* If thumbnail is not available, try to show the mimetype icon. Better
than nothing.

v 0.5 (Jan 22, 2006):

* Create and display conversation for email hits
* Cluster web-hits by website
* Cosmetic cleanup
* Moved license from "public-domain" to MIT
* Artistic touches to beagled-not-running, no results found pages
* Display all properties for files
* Show all entries in To and Cc fields of email results
* Some CSS changes to make it look better
* Display RSS Feed results
* Added actions for music hits
* Store recent search history, window dimensions and positions across sessions

(skipping 0.4, somehow it never got released)

v 0.3 (Jan 5, 2006):

* Fixed non-english query and results
* Fixed icon paths (made them relative to script location)

v 0.2 (Dec 25/26, 2005):

* Added snippets
* Added thumbnail
* Added javascript to hide snippets until I want them - they look ugly
* Added category for pictures
* Fixed UTC time issues

v0.1.1 (Dec 24, 2005):

* Added status information
* Added send file

v0.1 (Dec 20, 2005):

* More or less works