Hello and welcome
Dave MacLachlan
Since some folks have been asking, I thought I'd do a quick intro
email to let people know a bit about Google Quick Search Box (aka QSB)
and myself . I am an engineer on the QSB-mac team here at Google, and
currently I am also the voice behind googleqsb on twitter (http://twitter.com/googleqsb
).
If you've found this email you probably already know that Google Quick
Search Box is a search box that allows you to search data on your
computer and across the web. The 'Google Quick Search Box' is based
directly on the open source project 'qsb-mac' (http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac/
). The main differences between the Google Quick Search Box and qsb-
mac is the addition of some plugins, and some slightly different
branding. For the rest of the email I will refer to them both as 'QSB'.
QSB started from some ideas we got while writing Google Desktop, mixed
with many ideas from our lead UI designer who is extremely familiar
with this product space. The lower levels of qsb-mac (the Vermilion
framework) are shared with our Google Mobile App for the iPhone, and
we share a lot of our design with the Windows version of QSB. Releases
of Google QSB (Mac) are code named after elements on the Periodic
table. Currently we have just released Iron (Fe), so you can expect
our next version will be Cobalt (Co) and so on.
QSB is expandable by third parties. Our SDK is available here: http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac/downloads/list
, and we have a support mailing list for developers here: http://groups.google.com/group/qsb-mac-dev
. Also, since we are an opensource project we are accepting patches,
and have already integrated several patches from external devs. If you
are interested in submitting patches, please read http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac/wiki/BecomingAContributor
.
We heavily encourage users to submit bugs and enhancement reports for
QSB. You can do this here: http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac/issues/
list. When logging a new issue, please look to see if it (or something
similar) has already been posted. If there is one already there, you
can 'star' it so your interest in the issue is recorded, and you will
get notifications about any changes to it's status. We actively use
the stars to allocate our resources, so it is in your best interest to
star items.
Hopefully this has been useful. Please post any other questions to
this list (http://groups.google.com/group/qsb-mac-discuss). We're
developing an active user community, and we'll collectively do our
best to answer your questions.
Cheers,
Dave
QSB-mac Tech-lead