I know many of you shy away from Cloud based applications and want to keep your data private on your own PC. This has been a goal of ours since we started developing Clibu.

So I'm pleased to let you know we have just released a version of Clibu that you can install and run on your own PC or Server.

Clibu 'On Premise' runs the server and database on your PC, which you can access from a Web Browser on any PC or Tablet on the LAN.

In future we'll provide the ability to access your Clibu 'On Premise' remotely from any PC/Tablet, should you desire this capability.

You can read more about this release on our Blog post: http://blog.surfulater.com/2016/05/12/clibu-v1-30-40-released-install-and-run-it-on-your-pcserver/ which includes access information.

This is a big step forward for Clibu and delivers functionality that products such as Evernote don't or can't or won't!

For more on Clibu see www.clibu.com

- Neville

That's brilliant, Neville. I look forward to the Mac version!

You may have timed that rather nicely – we're looking to replace an existing in-house search engine.

Thanks, it is an exciting and interesting development and fairly unique to have both a cloud app and one that can be installed locally and in your control.

The 'On Premise' version is the same as the one we run at myclibu.com with slight differences to cater for the fact it is running locally.

FYI Clibu currently has an issue on Mac's with pasting images and acquiring images via. the Clibu Web Clipper. I need to get hold of Mac to work out what is causing this and resolve it.

For the Mac 'On Premise' version we need to take a completely different approach to what we've done with Windows, as the app we use to make the Windows .exe is only available for Windows.

You may have heard of Docker, which I've done a reasonable amount of work on in relation to Clibu and that's where we'll likely go with Mac and Linux 'On Premise' Clibu versions.

Yo Neville,

I've been playing with Clibu, and there's much I like, especially the nested tagging, highlighting of search terms, multilingual support etc.

But - and maybe this is where I need to go away and RTFM? - I can't find any way to search within a filtered list of tags?

It appears you can either filter stuff using tags/nested tags OR you can search for stuff, but you can't confine your search to a filtered list?

When handling large amounts of information, this is a fairly vital requirement, I think. On the other hand, maybe I've overlooked something!

Cheers,
Bill

Argh! I've just come across another problematic issue. As it stands, Clibu only finds full words – it doesn't find parts of words (so it won't find the "sand" in "sandwich", for example). Is that the case, or should I be using specific syntax? (An asterisk doesn't work, unfortunately).

Hi Bill,
I don't think I'd considered search within tags and it hadn't been suggested before, however I can certainly see the use case and technically it isn't a problem.

However I need to think about the way the user would actually accomplish this. Would you expect that if the 'tags filter' was in use and you did a search, it would only search within the tags filter results.

The problem I see with that is if you want to search all articles you'd need to set the 'tags filter' accordingly first which a) is an extra step, b) could be confusing as folks might not get the results they expect because the 'tags filter' is in use. (I'm thinking aloud here).

Hi Bill,
The full text search in Clibu does use stemming etc. however the current implementation leaves a bit to be desired. My plan is to replace the current search engine with a better one to address the current shortcomings.

MadaboutDana wrote:

Argh! I've just come across another problematic issue. As it stands,
Clibu only finds full words – it doesn't find parts of words (so
it won't find the "sand" in "sandwich", for example). Is that the case,
or should I be using specific syntax? (An asterisk doesn't work,
unfortunately).

Yo Neville,

I suppose I'd expect there to be some kind of "search within search" function - either by being able to apply a tag filter to an existing set of search results or being able to search within an existing set of filtered tags. As I see it, that shouldn't really be more than a two-click experience, e.g.

first select your tags...
then (perhaps through a drop-down option in the search box specifying e.g. 'search within tag filter'?) type in your specific term/phrase and click 'Find'
or
first do your search for a term/phrase
then (again, using a drop-down option the tag filter box, e.g. 'apply filter to search results') specify your constraining filter

The drop-down option for search/filter functions is a relatively user-friendly way of doing this (you'll find it in all sorts of apps and web apps, usually in the form of a magnifying glass with a dropdown arrow alongside it), and I suspect adds minimal programming overhead.

As for stemming/word parts: this is a tricky function. I think that ultimately, you need a very powerful full-text search engine at the core of the app, so that even if the right set of stemming variants can't be found (e.g. because it's an unusual language), at least the full-text search can spot partial strings. I know this is a demanding requirement, for a variety of sound technical reasons (how do you index arbitrary strings?), but engines such as Lucene appear to have got the wherewithal to handle it. But I can't pretend to be an expert in this field. Only a fussy user!

Cheers,
Bill

Hi Bill, yes that all sounds reasonable.

One thing I do need to add to the Search widget is a drop down history list so that you can easilly repeat previous searches. Search also needs a way to clear the current search and revert to showing al articles, possibly via a [x] close button. And it needs a way to search across multiple knowledge bases.

So the user interface for searching within tags and applying tags filters within search needs to also take the above into account.

I've also been wondering whether there is some way to combine search + tags filter into a single widget, but now with your enhancements I feel the current arrangement is necessary.

Yes search with stemming etc, is difficult. That said I'm confident that what's there now can be replaced and improved quite a bit.

Neville