Thank you for the many positive responses to the release of FastFinder. Since its launch there have been major developments in the world of search. In recent weeks two major new search engines were launched, Wolfram Alpha and Microsoft’s Bing. And both are claiming to be the next frontier in intelligent search.
Wolfram Alpha launched under a big hype, and some were already predicting the end of the Google era. The reviewer at Trusted Reviews was probably more on the ball when he commented “I suspect it is Wikipedia, not Google, which might feel the pinch…”. It seems that the interest in Wolfram has faded as quickly as the hype, so it will be interesting to see what happens next. No offense to it’s founder but I personally still don’t like the name. It’s too complex, but then again the whole search experience feels a bit nerdy. But it will have its fans, so we have included WolframAlpha in FastFinder and have grouped it under ‘encyclopedia’, just under Wikipedia.
The second big launch was Bing, Microsoft’s attempt to finally get their search offering right. Reviews have been mostly positive. Personally I’m still confused on what the homepage pictures of rustic buildings and sweeping landscapes have to do with search and I’m not convinced that ‘Bing’ is a good name either. More problematic is the fact that the ‘decision engine’ part of Bing, which is supposed to show in the ‘intelligent’ sidebars, only seems to work well in the US. But you can be sure that Microsoft will keep investigating and most people seem to agree that it’s a major leap forward from the mostly failed Live search. “Live” has now been fully replaced by Bing, so we’ve updated the logo and the links in FastFinder to reflect this.
In addition to these new arrivals and in response to customer requests, we’ve also added support for del.icio.us (now delicious.com) and digg. We are planning to keep on top of developments in the search engine world and will keep adding and updating the engines in FastFinder accordingly.
The new version of FastFinder also includes a fix for a bug that’s showing under the new 3.0 iPhone operating system. The application re-uses the same UITableView both for displaying and editing search engines. Unfortunately, OS3.0 has implemented some stricter controls around the use of TableViews, which sometimes causes FastFinder to crash when pressing the edit button. The fix will solve this.
The new release was submitted to Apple 3 weeks ago, but unfortunately it seems that FastFinder has now also got stuck in Apple’s review process. We appreciate your patience while we wait for Apple and hope the update will get approved soon.
UPDATE 1-JUL-2009: we’ve now received the dreaded email from Apple stating:
“Your application, FastFinder, is requiring unexpected additional time for review.“
Without any further explanation. We’re hoping to receive better news soon.