Krugle Beta

Last week I mentioned I had been told to expect my Krugle beta invite soon. It showed up today. I just finished playing around with it and …

Check out this feature list for “beta-4″. Who do you think this product is aimed at?

Preliminary “back” button support (more coming in future versions).

Better results for JavaDoc searches.

Faster code searches.

Independent searching for C vs. C++ code files.

Structured code search for JavaScript and PHP files.

Initial support for Ruby, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, and XML code search.

Pretty sweet, eh? How about this quote from the online help:

When the directory pane is open, you can use it to �browse� all known open source code that is available on the internet.

If you sling code for a living or even just dabble with small hobby projects nights and weekends, I think you’re going to want to check this thing out. It is definitely aimed straight at you.

Anywho, as I mentioned, I’ve just been playing around with it and I think it’ll be pretty useful when it goes live. The UI takes a bit of getting used to, but when it is all said and done it sure seems to be more useful than just googling for a function name in hopes of hitting a useful code sample.

So how to describe the UI? First, here’s a picture I “liberated” from the online help (which is pretty useful while trying to get the hang of how this thing works). Once you grok the layout and the purpose of the various tabs, it becomes pretty intuitive.

The left most tab in the main pane area keeps track of your search results. When you click on something returned from your search, it opens a new tab in that main area. Also, the right sidebar area opens up that project and shows you where the file you’re viewing is at in the grander scheme of things. So yes, you can then browse other files in that same project very quickly and intuitively. Click one and get a new tab. The “world view” tab in the right sidebar is a bit more daunting. The gives you a pretty large list of, and I quote, “all open source projects”. Yikes.

Oh, did I mention that the code viewer is, in general, syntax aware and color coded? Except for C#. Everything else I dug up was nice and pretty though.

I have much more playing around to do though. I have to explore the “Find Content” as opposed “Find Code” search. See the little toolbar along the bottom of the screen in that screenshot above? I haven’t explored any of that yet.

I really dig it. � Big thanks to the Krugle folks for letting me play!

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