[ANNOUNCE] Tracker 0.0.3

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

The third release of Tracker is now available at:

http://www.gnome.org/~jamiemcc/tracker/tracker-0.0.3.tar.gz

INTRODUCTION

Tracker is a powerful metadata database and Search tool. It is also an 
indexer framework that provides the ability to index, store, retrieve 
and search all types of file metadata including user defined ones.

Tracker automatically monitors your filesystem and harvests metadata 
from files and indexes the text contents of them whenever they change.

Tracker can provide google-like searches of your data as well as more 
sophisticated queries and enables users/applications to create arbitrary 
metadata for just about anything.

Tracker is super efficient with your systems memory when compared with 
some other competing frameworks and is designed for use on low memory 
systems.

Tracker now has a new mailing list (tracker-list gnome org).

You can subscribe to it at:

http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/tracker-list

Please report any comments, bugs or build problems on the above mailing 
list.



NEW FEATURES

* Redesigned DBus Api to be more generic

* Corrected search results of hyphenated search terms

* Added support for limiting no. of hits for searches

* Added optional support for sorting search results by relevance score

* A few minor bug fixes (Updating file name metadata correctly during 
move, correcting use of hyphenated search terms)

* Streamlined the inlined version of libextractor and improved build 
system and fixed bug in previous version which prevented compilation of 
the inlined version.


Tracker's other features include:

* Very memory efficient and non-leaking (typical RAM usage 4 - 6 MB). 
Unlike some other indexers, tracker is designed and built to run well on 
lower memory systems with typically 128MB or 256MB memory. It should 
even be efficient enough to use on some mobile devices.

* Non-bloated and written in C for maximum efficiency.

* Fast indexing and unobtrusive - no need to index stuff overnight. 
Tracker runs at nice+10 so it should have a minimal impact on your system.

* Integrated as a Nautilus search backend and as a Deskbar applet backend.

* Implements the freedesktop specification for metadata 
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards_2fshared_2dfilemetadata_2dspec

* Extracts embedded File, Image, Document and Audio type metadata from 
files.

* Extracts embedded metadata from HTML, PDF, PS, OLE2 (DOC, XLS, PPT), 
OpenOffice (sxw), StarOffice (sdw), DVI, MAN, MP3 (ID3v1 and ID3v2), 
OGG, WAV, EXIV2, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, DEB, RPM, TAR(.GZ), ZIP, ELF, 
REAL, RIFF (AVI), MPEG, QT and ASF files

* Supports the WC3's RDF Query syntax for querying metadata

* Provides support for both free text search (like Beagle/Google) as 
well as structured searches using RDF Query

* Respond in real time to file system changes to keep its metadata 
database up to date and in synch

* Fully extendable with custom metadata - you can store, retrieve, 
register and search via RDF Query all your own custom metadata

* Can extract a file's contents as plain text and index them

* Provides text filters for PDF, MS Office, OpenOffice (all versions), 
HTML and PS files.

* Can provide thumbnailing on the fly


KNOWN ISSUES

You tell me! (email tracker-list gnome org)

Tracker is fairly stable even at this early stage but there will almost 
certainly be bugs/issues so please let me know of any problems.



--
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://www.advogato.org/person/jamiemcc/