Googleaccountsearch/english

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Google Account Search Beta

File:Googleaccountsearch en.png

Description

This is an enhanced version of Google Calendar Search. Enhancements include search in Contacts, multiple accounts and partial search in Calendar. This program searches directly in your Google or Google Apps Calendars and Contacts for the given search terms. Of course this program only makes sense, if one syncs his/her Palm Pre or Pixi calendar/contacts with a Google Account.

Motivation

This program was written because of the following reasons:

  • at the moment, webOS can not search in the calendar
  • searching Google Calendar in desktop browsers does not work well with many results and can not do partial search
  • in the Palm browser, one is always being directed to the mobile version of Google Calendar, where search is not available at all
  • webOS Universal Search only searches in name and company fields of contacts

Basic Usage

Just choose your search direction, put in some search terms and press enter or the magnifier button. You can recall the last search terms with the history button on the left.

When searching for the very first time, the program will offer you to add a Google account. Without a Google account, a search in Google Calendar or Google Contacts cannot be performed. After you entered your valid account data, you will see the calendars of that account and a back swipe will return you to the Main screen, where you can start your search.

Main screen

The Main screen has 3 parts.

Search controls

Terms

Enter the search terms in this text field. Tap the magnifier button or press the enter key on the keyboard to start a search.

History button

The history button at the upper left lets you chose from your previous search terms.

Magnifier button

The magnifier button or the enter key on the keyboard start the search. While the search is running, you can abort at any time with the Stop button, which will show you the results so far, if any.

Calendar search options

Direction

Here you can chose in which direction the calendar should be searched.

  • Backward from now
  • Forward from now
  • Both directions (range depending on settings in Preferences)

Partial search

Google can only search for whole words in the calendar. If you want to search for parts of words (aka substring search), then enable this option. But this means, that the program will have to retrieve all your calendar events from Google (within the configured limits) and then do the partial search by itself. Because of the vast amount of data, this kind of search is slow.

Search options

Search in calendars

Enable this to do a search in the calendars.

Search in contacts

Enable this to do a search in the contacts.

Show contacts first

Enable this to show the contacts in the results list first, otherwise the calendar events are being shown first.

Results screen

File:Googleaccountsearch results en.png

If the search was successful (you got at least 1 result), the results screen will be displayed. You will see the contacts and/or calendar events which contain the search term.

Tapping on a calendar event opens the local Calendar of your device for that specific day.

Tapping on a contact cannot show you the corresponding contact on your device automatically, because webOS does not allow it. So, after you tapped a contact you will be asked to link the Google contact with one of your on device contacts. A list of all your contacts will be displayed to chose from. You can narrow down the list by typing some text. After the contact is linked, the next time you tap on it will take you immediately to the linked contact on your device.

Please note, that even though you on device contacts are essentially linked to Google by webOS, they still have to be linked again in this program, because of the mentioned webOS restrictions.

Preferences & Accounts

Account definition

Account options

Privacy

The Google logins and passwords will be saved unencrypted in a database. Encryption would not make sense without a master password. If you lose your Palm, a webOS expert could find out the saved password.

Support

googleaccountsearch(at)vivalv.de

History

  • 0.1.1