I'm a Mac user who's creating his first site. I want a site search feature for it. WRENsoft was recommended, but my review of its FAQs confuses me. It says Mac-platform users can work with WRENsoft. It also says that indexing is not currently available to Macs. I have no idea what indexing does/provides. Could someone please help a Web newbie understand the purpose and value of indexing?
Thanks. If you're a Mac user, please also weigh in regarding how well you like WRENsoft and how easy it is to use.
Many thanks, all.
Warren
The indexer is actually a complicated piece of software. A Mac version would probably be about 6 to 12 months development work. And with Macs only being 5% of the market and the product being a niche product, we estimate that it would take 33.5 years to recover our investment. Unless we dramatically increased the price of the Mac version.
I have long held the view that Apple should give away some hardware and maybe cash grants to a few key software development companies. Because until they hit around 15% market share only the mass market applications will be released on the Mac. It would only take maybe $15K and a couple of free Mac boxes to make moving our application to the Mac look economical :-)
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David
You need to run the indexer at least once to create a set of index file. The search script are run each time there is a seach performed on the web site.
The indexer is Windows only software. However once you have made a set of index files you can run the scripts on just about any machine. Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac, etc...
Some of our users have had success with running Zoom Indexer on a Mac with Virtual PC (http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/faq_errors.html#virtualpcmac) 6.1 for Mac. But Virtual PC doesn't really work as fast or as well as a real Windows PC.
So it isn't the perfect Mac solution. But most Mac houses seem to have an old Windows machine sitting around for stuff like this.
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David
Until indexing is made available for Mac world folk like me, I'll pass on WRENsoft.
Might you know if and when WRENsoft plans to accept those 5% of us in Mac world? [ ;+}
Thanks again, David.
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