Volition

One of the more annoying things about Epiphany when I first started to use it was the lack of hierarchical bookmarks. I soon got over it when it was pointed out to me that the intended way to use bookmarks in Epiphany was to search for them in the location bar, not use the Bookmarks menu or the bookmarks toolbar. This was in-itself an epiphany - it works really well.

Now, the same thing has (almost) arrived for the whole of the Gnome desktop: the Deskbar applet.

This is excellent! The plan is to have it search through and allow you to do pretty much anything from it, like sending an email to a particular person, finding a bookmark, doing Internet searches, running graphical applications and command-line tools and opening and searching for documents on disk.

I have a number of suggestions for it:

• Gdict lookup, so I only need Deskbar on my panel and not both it and the Gdict applet
• Search Epiphany bookmark topic names as well as just the bookmarks, so if I have a topic called "foo", and type that in, Deskbar shows all bookmarks in that topic
• Have a global keyboard shortcut (Alt+Ctrl+L ?)
• (Everyone's favourite) Filename tab-completion

Of course, Apple pioneered this with Spotlight, but these guys are taking the idea and expanding upon it to make it a truly useful thing. Rock!