Hi everybody,
I still have the dream to launch every app by name. Secondly I would love to
enter a search string for Google, Amazon, Wikipedia etc. in TW before starting
the browser. I have a similar vision for both, but we need to walk a fine line
to don't make look like UniversalSearch.

I have been talking about the QuickAppFind a couple of times, this is how I
would implement it:
When the user starts typing a panel with the matches opens. The panel is the
same as the one for the wheel selector from the hub. The top line are the
characters typed (w/ a fixed underscore as a cursor), below are the matches,
with the top match highlighted by default. Starting the app by tap on the line
or RETURN for the selected. The height of the panel depend on #matches, at most
it is 8 lines total. For simplicity, the matches are shown without icons (we
could small ones later, but not important). The matches are choosen from all
items in the app list (I just have too many to put them all on wheels), or on
wheels (if we add more invisible wheels).

QuickWebFind goes somewhat similar to how Opera does it, e.g.:
'g text1' would search text1 on Google, 'w text2' would search text2 on
Wikipedia.
It starts out similar to QuickAppFind, you type one character (e.g. 'g' and the
apps starting with 'g' appear as a list) but if this first character is followed
by a SPACE, the mode is switched: the panel becomes 2 lines, the first reads the
name of the search site (e.g. 'Google:'), the second is the search string with
an underscore as a cursor. When the user hits RETURN or taps on the panel, the
search starts, if he taps elsewhere or more than fully deletes the searchstring,
the search ends.
The search engines uses can be configured by the user on a new config page, for
each engine there are 3 fields:
- the indentifying char ('g')
- the Name of the search engine to be displayed in the panel (e.g. 'Google')
- the website to be launched (e.g. 'http://www.google.com/search?q=##find', with
##find being the placeholder for the search string.

What do you to think?

Volker