welcome to hope springs

Karl,

There is no code for the Association Browser, unless that’s changed in the year since I’ve been gone. I remember the idea was first devised during a series of brainstorming meetings among the desktop hackers, probably in 2004, and Jimmac (I think? Maybe Garrett) created this first-pass mockup one day:

There may have been an internal wiki page about it, but certainly no code.

The idea with the association browser was that you’d have a “focal object” (in this case, “Brand Grub”) and you’d see items directly related to that object in a way that was appropriate for that data. This was somewhat similar to how Dashboard worked — each piece of data looked different and specific to its type: emails looked different than documents and addressbook contacts, for example. But unlike Dashboard, this would be a fully-fledged application you could use to navigate your data. If you wanted to shift your focal object, say from “Brand Grub” to “Bilbo Baggins”, you could do that easily… I think we called that “rotating”.

The purpose of showing this in my old GUADEC talk was to illustrate the kinds of interesting applications people could build on top of Beagle beyond the obvious and boring all-encompassing search tools. Unfortunately I don’t think that’s happened. From my perspective, both Beagle and Tracker ended up focusing way too much on the backend (storage and retrieval of metadata just aren’t that interesting to most people) and not enough on making users’ lives easier.

So there you have it. The “code” for the association browser. Next time, feel free to email me about it first.