I developed some software that improves on how you find text in documents, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zizoaped950. It's a major usability improvement and I expected someone like Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, or Google to have done something similar by now. (I released the first version 5 years ago. Apple did it to some extent when they started animating the display of found text, but that’s only a small piece of it.)<p>1) Is there any way I could make money off this?<p>2) If not, is there any easy way I could get a big player to "steal" the idea to benefit users (with very little work on my part)?<p>I started the project for fun but now I want to create a viable startup and I’ve stopped working on it. But it would be nice if I could do something with it.
It looks like a nicely implemented and useful utility.<p>But there's nothing really new in incremental searching (emacs has had it for years and years, firefox search works in a similar fashion). I suppose the main thing is the cross-application support.<p>I don't personally think you could make much money out of it.<p>I'm not sure who would "steal" it either. This kind of searching (as opposed to indexing) is per-application really. An OS-level "search any text interactively" feature might confuse users.
You could make money off of this shareware, at least some.<p>Personally, I see the video and I think it's useful enough that I would pay $4.99 provided a trial worked well and that I knew it worked with Vista/Windows7/etc.<p>Perhaps I'm not alone?<p><i>Edit:</i> I'd love if you made a Firefox extension for this. I like your approach better than most approaches.<p>On Vista, I had to run HandyFind as an admin to get it to see Notepad properly, it seems.
This seems like it might have an accessibility audience; easy navigation for people without a mouse.<p>Simple question to frame the inquiry: What's the advantage of your technology over control/command F and control/command G? The answer to that probably has hints as to a possible audience.<p>--<p>I've been hacking on a basic javascript-based regex highlighter (MIT license) that could be incorporated into a similar web technology, if you were so inclined. Check out <a href="http://www.jacobrothstein.com/highlightRegex/demonstration.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.jacobrothstein.com/highlightRegex/demonstration.h...</a> for a demo and <a href="http://github.com/jbr/jQuery.highlightRegex" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/jbr/jQuery.highlightRegex</a> for the code. Enjoy!
Firefox and Safari and some text editors already have incremental search which is most of what you have here. I do like like the way you change color to indicate already-seen text. I wish I had that in FF and Emacs.
I found the green bubbles incredibly distracting in the demo video. My eye was drawn to a bright green bubble that contained what you were typing, and less drawn to the part of the text which matched your search. It was really hard for me to tell if this would be useful to me... perhaps just going a little slower could help that.
This is fairly close to how find already works in Firefox and Safari... instant, progressive advance-to-next-match and highlighting of all matches. I would expect that style to gradually migrate to other apps without any promotional effort.<p>Besides the fact that the keys/gestures for 'next/prev' and 'repeat' are a little different, what part of HandyFind isn't matched in these browsers?