A Present for Monocle Users
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That’s awesome! I may be able to dump Inquisitor once this is out, which is developed by someone I find rather objectionable. Keep up the fantastic work.
By Matt J · 2007.12.24 00:30
Keen viewers may have also observed that that’s a list of search helpers, with vacant space, even. The reason for this is that you can’t reorder ordinary check boxes, of course. (But what if there’s something more to it? Hmm…)
You mention Inquisitor, and I knew this was going to come up, and I want to talk about Inquisitor for a bit to clarify my position.
Inquisitor is synonymous with a deft Google Suggest implementation and especially also with inclusion of search results directly, and it is synonymous with these things for a reason. Inquisitor did it first and to this day best, and David Watanabe is a skilled developer for doing so.
However, I should note (preemptively) that someone else - including me - implementing these things afterwards is not equivalent to some sort of immoral stealing. This is how software development works. I use Inquisitor, I write my own search tool (started before Inquisitor was around and originally based on even older code) and I’ll eventually want to implement a similar feature.
In this case, I wanted it myself, but if you were to draw a Venn diagram over Monocle’s users, its blob would intersect greatly with “people who have heard of, or used, Inquisitor”, so it’s not an unreasonable request of any Monocle user to ask me to implement this (and yes, I have gotten such requests), and it’s not an unreasonable action of a developer with such a product to actually implement this.
As for “intellectual property”, I don’t believe in software patents (and they are unpatentable inside the EU, where I am located), and if this is a patentable idea, it should be noted that people have done similar things - “prior art” exists - before both me and Dave. Recall that Google Suggest is in fact a feature Google provides, and that the way suggestions are presented owe a lot to autocompletion in location bars and combo boxes, implemented years and decades ahead of Google Suggest.
By Jesper · 2007.12.24 01:02
It isn’t like you’re making money off of Monocle, an David Watanabe gives Inquisitor away for free anyway.
By Matt J · 2007.12.24 11:12
Right. I just want to make clear that while I am cribbing two of Inquisitor’s features, I believe there’s nothing wrong in doing so. (Because if it was, then it would have been wrong for Dave to implement them to begin with.)
At the end of the day, I really want to make sure that this doesn’t come off as me proclaiming to have invented this. I want to be clear with that it does come from Inquisitor, and that in my opinion Inquisitor is a terrific utility.
By Jesper · 2007.12.24 11:34