

Ask HN: What should I do with this project (HandyFind)? - ektimo

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.)<p>1) Is there any way I could make money off this?<p>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)?<p>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.
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yangyang
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.

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

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thorax
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.

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jbr
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...](http://www.jacobrothstein.com/highlightRegex/demonstration.html)
for a demo and <http://github.com/jbr/jQuery.highlightRegex> for the code.
Enjoy!

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herdrick
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.

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jwb119
clickable link: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zizoaped950>

~~~
russell
<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

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sheriff
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.

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I_got_fifty
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.

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gojomo
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?

~~~
ektimo
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.

~~~
gojomo
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.

~~~
ektimo
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.

