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Ask HN: What should I do with this project (HandyFind)?
16 points by ektimo on June 20, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 15 comments
I developed some software that improves on how you find text in documents, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zizoaped950. It's a major usability improvement and I expected someone like Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, or Google to have done something similar by now. (I released the first version 5 years ago. Apple did it to some extent when they started animating the display of found text, but that’s only a small piece of it.)

1) Is there any way I could make money off this?

2) If not, is there any easy way I could get a big player to "steal" the idea to benefit users (with very little work on my part)?

I started the project for fun but now I want to create a viable startup and I’ve stopped working on it. But it would be nice if I could do something with it.




It looks like a nicely implemented and useful utility.

But there's nothing really new in incremental searching (emacs has had it for years and years, firefox search works in a similar fashion). I suppose the main thing is the cross-application support.

I don't personally think you could make much money out of it.

I'm not sure who would "steal" it either. This kind of searching (as opposed to indexing) is per-application really. An OS-level "search any text interactively" feature might confuse users.


Perhaps you could repurpose it as a library that app developers can incorporate into their products.


You could make money off of this shareware, at least some.

Personally, I see the video and I think it's useful enough that I would pay $4.99 provided a trial worked well and that I knew it worked with Vista/Windows7/etc.

Perhaps I'm not alone?

Edit: I'd love if you made a Firefox extension for this. I like your approach better than most approaches.

On Vista, I had to run HandyFind as an admin to get it to see Notepad properly, it seems.


This seems like it might have an accessibility audience; easy navigation for people without a mouse.

Simple question to frame the inquiry: What's the advantage of your technology over control/command F and control/command G? The answer to that probably has hints as to a possible audience.

--

I've been hacking on a basic javascript-based regex highlighter (MIT license) that could be incorporated into a similar web technology, if you were so inclined. Check out http://www.jacobrothstein.com/highlightRegex/demonstration.h... for a demo and http://github.com/jbr/jQuery.highlightRegex for the code. Enjoy!


Firefox and Safari and some text editors already have incremental search which is most of what you have here. I do like like the way you change color to indicate already-seen text. I wish I had that in FF and Emacs.


clickable link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zizoaped950


http://handykeys.com is the web site.

The video needs to be redone with better enunciation and a presentation volume as if speaking to room not a pillow mate. I am somewhat hard of hearing in one ear and it took me three tries to get the above URL.

It looks to be worth investigating as a site search tool.

Edit: URL corrected


[deleted]


http://handykeys.com/ - download the stable version.

http://handykeys.com/v3 - download the beta version shown in the video.

Sorry about the sound and thanks for the feedback. I knew it sucked but it was going to come down to that or nothing.


I found the green bubbles incredibly distracting in the demo video. My eye was drawn to a bright green bubble that contained what you were typing, and less drawn to the part of the text which matched your search. It was really hard for me to tell if this would be useful to me... perhaps just going a little slower could help that.


C-s and C-r on emacs does pretty much the same thing. It is cross-application, but maybe not quite in the same way.


This is fairly close to how find already works in Firefox and Safari... instant, progressive advance-to-next-match and highlighting of all matches. I would expect that style to gradually migrate to other apps without any promotional effort.

Besides the fact that the keys/gestures for 'next/prev' and 'repeat' are a little different, what part of HandyFind isn't matched in these browsers?


My biggest complaint with current search in all the browsers is that if you don't find what you're looking for, it takes a while to realize what has happened since there is no obvious feedback (though FF is pretty good). Also, it isn't obvious if you have wrapped around or it is hard to find the text if the font is small.


If I were you, and I knew C well enough, I'd actually fix the search in Firefox or Chrome to implement these features, then use that to demonstrate my skill to clients, employers or fellow geeks.


Safari does this better, darkening the whole page except for the matches. (I'm looking at Safari 4 in Windows.)

That makes the matches about as prominent as your colorful pop-up bubble display.


I agree that's really nice... but what happens when the text isn't found? The feedback is that the page brightens. Even if I know to shift my eyes to the entry field, it feels odd to me that the feedback for something going wrong is that the page lightens up.




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