Appstore Intelligent Search

[gruso]

Why not link something like "Arcade" and other such variants to MAME as it is an odd term for a new user.

Arcade
Arcade Games
Arcade Emulator

etc.... ??

^ I was just thinking about that exact thing. "Arcade" could point people towards a page describing MAME, FinalBurn and whatever else. I remember having to learn all this stuff when I first got my GP2X... something explaining the different arcade emus and their specialties would have been very helpful!

I think people in search of powerful titles will search for "3D". They could be offered four paths:
- Ports/homebrew such as Quake, Human Condition
- Emulators like PSX, N64
- Developer resources (engines etc)
- OpenGL/SGX demos

I don't know how much of this is just reinventing the wheel when there will be categories/tags anyway. I suppose we should keep spewing forth the ideas, Craig will filter them.

People will also search for "SDK". Do with that what you will!

There should also be easter eggs for dumb searches, like Duke Nukem Forever and Bike Shed.

 

[NLS]

Wine
Not possible

I think if you search wine it should first ask red or white and then sweet or dry.

Heh yeah, if we end up like the iPhones app store, I guess there's eventually gonna be some app for wine selection on the Pandora as well.

 

[zohnnyg]

how about a section or something that leads to "how to" and "tutorial"? it could be for installing things or how they work and such.

 

[Trevsweb]

Roms = GTFO
anime = GTFO
porn = maybe later, but for now GTFO (make the screen shake with javascript )http://javascript.internet.com/image-effects/shake-screen.html
noodles = NOODLE MONSTER!!!1one (pic of craigs face )
genesis = also known as mega drive, (link to wiki), tutorial on forums
megadrive = also known as genesis, (link to wiki), tutorial on forums

tbh as long as each of the system names are labelled with choices eg megadrive/genesis you get what the system is (with a wiki link) what emulators and apps are available, and maybe a link to a tutorial or forum post here on how to install games and play it.

also we can use this to redefine searches. like arcade said above. a bit like google and "did you mean mame?" get people on the right track.

would be a good idea maybe to keep track on what people are searching for in the first few months to help out the process.

 

[Bosbeetle]

It would be nice if people searched extentions like doc mp3 txt mkv etc. that they get pointed to programs that can handle these filetypes. Also a nice detailed option page about codecs etc. would be nice when the query codec or codecs is given.

And of course if somebody searches two months they should get a animation of gruso killing a kitten.

 

[Dunny]

Funnily enough, Jaguar's instant off-topic post provided some on-topic ideas.

Gruso speaks the truth, as always. That post immediately made me consider that we could have entries for each console or computer emulated - Amiga/ST/Megadrive/Speccy/C64 etc with a nice bit of history and whether or not Jeff Minter killed it off by writing a game for it.

So for "Jaguar" you might get "One of the first consoles to be marketed as 'True 64bit' with some classic titles available. This console was developed for by Jeff Minter, and as such suffered an early demise. An emulator for one single game (Tempest 2k) was in development for the GP2X and the author has expressed an interest in continuing that for the Pandora, but no emulator for the Pandora currently exists."

Or it could respond with "Known forum troll; ignore".

D.

 

[Bosbeetle]

Funnily enough, Jaguar's instant off-topic post provided some on-topic ideas.

Gruso speaks the truth, as always. That post immediately made me consider that we could have entries for each console or computer emulated - Amiga/ST/Megadrive/Speccy/C64 etc with a nice bit of history and whether or not Jeff Minter killed it off by writing a game for it.

So for "Jaguar" you might get "One of the first consoles to be marketed as 'True 64bit' with some classic titles available. This console was developed for by Jeff Minter, and as such suffered an early demise. An emulator for one single game (Tempest 2k) was in development for the GP2X and the author has expressed an interest in continuing that for the Pandora, but no emulator for the Pandora currently exists."

Or it could respond with "Known forum troll; ignore".

D.

This calles for wikipedia like disambiguation pages

 

[Esn]

Maybe a strange one but I think it would be nice if there were a category of 'games created by forum members' and a search with certain user names that will list the games/ports they made. (also projects with multiple members should be mentioned) I will do a monthly mr.gonzo search for sure (not to mention pickle, zodttd, etc.)

I like this idea! Create a "credits" list for each program, and have IMDB-like pages for people (with links to their official website and/or GP32X user profile).

 

[NLS]

Yeah. "Browse more apps from this user"

 

[Vlynndar]

If 'armstrong' should point to angstrom, then 'maim' should point to mame (as well as descriptions of games that use the word, but you likely got that covered).

 

[dflemstr]

I don't get it. Just make an unified tag system and search for the generated tags. E.g. the uploader, the section of the app, tags added by the uploader and tags added in comments should be added in the unified tag system, and then you'll just search for those tags and are done with it.

Then there's "articles" or some other content type besides "applications" that contains info about Ångström and so on, and those articles have tags as well. Easy.

See how I dealt with taxonomy on http://pandorawalls.dyndns.org/

Examples:
http://pandorawalls.dyndns.org/search/node/(naw)mcx
http://pandorawalls.dyndns.org/search/node/Photographs
http://pandorawalls.dyndns.org/search/node/blue
http://pandorawalls.dyndns.org/search/node/Pandora%20Wallpapers

 

[mosschops]

The Pandora Appstore does not use a dumb search, rather it has various levels of preprogrammed tweaking.

I'm trying to get everything smooth for new users.

Some examples are:

Searching for MAME will tell you what it is, explain it does not come with ROMs and give you the latest version.

What else could we add in for new users?

How do i as a new user know to search for MAME?

Because a lot of people get a gp2x/wiz/pandora because they know what it can do, but as we see constantly on this forum they don't know how to make it do it. They will often come in here utterly confused about how MAME works. They will have managed to download it, but then be stuck.

So if the appstore explains how to use it, we at least have a fighting chance of them understanding.

cheers chief!
my thoughts were of NEW users, not new users :blink:

my question was more... "i want to play Outrun, what do i need to play it" with an eye on there being several "levels" of software that will be on the pandora... "standard games", "applications" and "emulators" with the emulators being a meta application of sorts. That way, and coupled with the mentioned dat files you could from within the appstore works out whether the emulated software will work on the pandora.

i understand that people may not knows the ins and outs of using MAME (this is a jolly good example) so being able to find what romset to use and what roms work / dont work will be most helpful.

i might add that (if i was writing it) i would see this as being able to support something hanging off the back for users reviews of the software, so authors could upload and users could comments upon configurations, working status, files required etc etc.

 

[dflemstr]

Hey, I just thought of something: what about PackageKit compliance? Might be difficult to implement, but interesting for the batch2 firmware, and as a patch for rev1, etc.

What I mean is that each app in the AppStore should have meta info attached to it such as which kind of files it can open, which commands it provides etc. All of this info is already available in the PXML.xml file so it shouldn't be a big deal to add. This would then have to be exposed in the search API, somehow; either on the Pandora itself or in the online AppStore.

There should then be a PackageKit backend on the Pandora, which basically gives us an AppStore front end for free + the end-user experience that when an user e.g. double-clicks on a SNES ROM file, PackageKit will suggest which emulators to download automatically and transparently. It would also be possible to create a backend for ipkg too (it's very similar to dpkg after all so you can take the dpkg/APT backend and switch some script names and you're done) which would mean that you'd be able to find all applications that are available for the Pandora in one unified PackageKit-based GUI.

The PK front-end on the Pandora would look like this:
http://www.packagekit.org/pk-screenshots.html

BTW, craigix, is the AppStore (server-side) software open source so that we in the community can have a look at it? If we know more about it (e.g. on which platform it runs (PHP, servlet, CGI, erlang inet, whatever), how modular it is, etc) we can come with more intelligent comments.

 

[craigix]

The appstore isn't open for security reasons (People having money in their accounts etc.)

But I'm happy to open the search code.

Currently I have it like this:

if ($se =~ /spectrum/ || $se =~ /Spectrum/ || $se =~ /SPECTRUM/) {
print "The ZX Spectrum was a range of home Computers made by Sinclair Research in 1982. The Pandora can emulate them very well - including the awesome 48k rubber keyboard. It will be like it never left you.<br><br>";
}

You're welcome to write your own and I'll include them all, within reason.

 

[NLS]

if ($se =~ /wine/ || $se =~ /Wine/ || $se =~ /WINE/) {
print "Wine will not work on the Pandora. If you are looking for a wine suggesting app, buy an iPhone.<br><br>";
}

 

[zhasha]

whatever's wrong with '$se =~ /whatever/i' ?

EDIT: oh and use a database! if you do the if ... else if approach you're basically screwing yourself from the beginning

 

[craigix]

whatever's wrong with '$se =~ /whatever/i' ?

Nothing, the example was more so the people putting the text in can put more than one thing.

Eg. MAME, MAME32, CLRMAME etc. etc. etc. as many as they want.

 

[WizardStan]

if ($se =~ /wine/ || $se =~ /Wine/ || $se =~ /WINE/) {
print "Wine will not work on the Pandora. If you are looking for a wine suggesting app, buy an iPhone.<br><br>";
}

Problem with regular expressions:

Search: Swine
Result: Wine will not work on the Pandora. If you are looking for a wine suggesting app, buy an iPhone.

And neat, it coloured my code as if it were code. Anywho, yeah, be careful with your regexs.

 

[Awakening]

I don't know what language you're using but it seems pretty pointless to have a case sensitive search. The code should simply operate in lowercase. Also all these search results should go into a database and not be hard coded in, so much work once you want to alter something and so easy to make mistakes when you have the same code over and over. Also saves on work and makes the code more readable to just reuse the same function.

 

[zhasha]

CREATE TABLE specialmsgs (
kid INT NOT NULL auto_increment,
msg TEXT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT ',
UNIQUE KEY kid (kid)
);

CREATE TABLE keywords (
kid INT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
keyword VARCHAR(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT ',
INDEX kid (kid),
INDEX keyword (keyword)
);

use something like that.

if ($se =~ /wine/ || $se =~ /Wine/ || $se =~ /WINE/) {
print "Wine will not work on the Pandora. If you are looking for a wine suggesting app, buy an iPhone.<br><br>";
}

Problem with regular expressions:

Search: Swine
Result: Wine will not work on the Pandora. If you are looking for a wine suggesting app, buy an iPhone.

And neat, it coloured my code as if it were code. Anywho, yeah, be careful with your regexs.

\bwine\b