{"id":299,"date":"2007-08-22T14:03:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-22T13:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/?p=299"},"modified":"2007-08-22T14:03:00","modified_gmt":"2007-08-22T13:03:00","slug":"tafiti-search-as-a-rich-internet-application","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/299-tafiti-search-as-a-rich-internet-application.html","title":{"rendered":"Tafiti: search as a rich internet application"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tafiti<\/a> is fascinating. Imagine what Google search would look like, if re-designed as a Flash application. This is it, except that it’s Live Search, not Google, and Silverlight<\/a>, not Flash.<\/p>\n

Let’s start with the good stuff. I ran this on a machine without Silverlight installed, and the installation of the plug-in was fast and smooth (though it restarts IE without remembering the open tabs, which is mildly annoying). The Tahiti app looks good and scales nicely. I searched for Silverlight, and results came back fast. You can easily filter the results, or drag and item onto a “shelf” for future reference, and the shelf persists between sessions.<\/p>\n

The best feature is a carousel at bottom left. This modifies the search by different types: books, news, feeds, web or images. The layout of the search results changes to match the type of search, so you get book covers and a print-like font for the book search, big headlines for a news search, and so on.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What’s bad about Tafiti? The biggest irritation comes when you actually want to navigate to a site you’ve found. The generic problem here is that you typically want to keep the list of results as well. I normally solve this by right-clicking and opening the site in a new tab. But this is an application, not HTML, so when you right-click you get a single menu option, “Silverlight configuration.” If you left-click it is even worse: <\/p>\n

\n

Tafiti is trying to show the site you chose. Please disable your popup blocker to see your selection.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It wants to open the site in a new window, see, and that triggers the popup blocker. Easily fixed with “Always allow popups from this site”, but still a jarring experience.<\/p>\n

These are actually minor quibbles. The more fundamental issue is, do you want search as an RIA? The problem is that search is a basic utility. What I want is quick results and easy navigation, never mind the frills, so I will take some persuading. Still, it could work if the application adds real value. Maybe a way of displaying more results on a page, without clutter, or categorising the results in some sensible way. It’s difficult, because attempts to be helpful often end up being counter-productive – and Microsoft is a specialist in over-helpful UIs, sadly.<\/p>\n

Despite these reservations, I think Tafiti is a great Silverlight demo, because the technology is nearly invisible. On my system at least, it just works, and at this stage that is what counts for most.<\/p>\n

PS: I am not sure what Tafiti is meant to mean, but according to Wikipedia<\/a> it is a dialect of a Polynesian language and means the strangers, <\/i>or people from a distance<\/i>. Perhaps Microsoft is talking about its search market share vs Google?<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: in the comments here and on the official faq<\/a> it is said that Tafiti means “do research” in Swahili, and that the app is specifically aimed at “research projects that span multiple search queries and sessions”.<\/p>\n

Technorati tags: tafiti<\/a>, silverlight<\/a>, google<\/a>, search<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tafiti is fascinating. Imagine what Google search would look like, if re-designed as a Flash application. This is it, except that it’s Live Search, not Google, and Silverlight, not Flash. Let’s start with the good stuff. I ran this on a machine without Silverlight installed, and the installation of the plug-in was fast and smooth (though … Continue reading Tafiti: search as a rich internet application<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,74,79,80,96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-search","category-software","category-software-development","category-web-authoring"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}