Did you know that we actually have a few File Exchange submissions that highlight the new File Exchange? That's right, one of our usability specialists, Matthew, has created 3 walkthrough videos on "How to submit a file", "Searching for a file", and "Searching for an author". They are each about 2 to 3 minutes long (~8 minutes total).
As you can see from the videos, we've revamped the searching capability. Whether you're searching for particular topics, casually browsing through files, or looking for files written by your favorite author, the new File Exchange will help you find what you want.
You probably have noticed that it now uses a "tag" system.
Tags can be added to the submissions, and you can quickly search by tags. There's also a "tag cloud" which shows you the relative popularity of topics. You can click on any of the terms and do a quick search on that tag.
But you're not limited to just searching through tags. You can search by other keywords, including author name, organization, rating, products, etc. Let's see how many MathWorkers have submitted files:
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/authors?term=organization:mathworks
You'll see several familiar names, including Bob, Brett, and myself. There's Doug way up there at #1 (as of the date of this post), and the other original Pick of the Week blogger, Scott Hirsch.
Just for kicks, I checked out my undergraduate and graduate schools.
Georgia Tech
(9 authors)
University
of Michigan (4 authors)
Note that these numbers are snapshots as of the date of this post.
Is your organization well-represented? Get your friends/colleagues to submit files and start building your community on the File Exchange.
Comments
Let us know what you think of the new search capability. Is it helping you find the files you want? Tell us how we can improve. We'll take back the feedback to the developers of the site.
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the MATLAB code
Published with MATLAB® 7.7
I would find useful to be able to register on a Author rating: for example I would like to get an email when John d’Errico rates a file 4-5 stars.
Thanks Thierry for your feedback.
You should be able to do that by subscribing to this search:
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/?term=ratepair:679/4
Click on “Watch this search”. It seems like this search only goes back to when we did the File Exchange switch (when we added the login requirement for commenting).
You can construct the search through here:
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/advanced_search
I think you need some kind of “trusted reviewer” metric.
There are some reviewers who take a great deal of care in their reviews, and are very accurate (John d’Errico for example; there are many others). That could be reflected through an Amazon.com-style “I found this review helpful” button. Those votes would then be reflected back into a relative reviewer rating. The reviewer rating could then be folded back into the computation for the average rating of a file, where trusted reviewers get more weight.
There are also the polar opposites. Such shall remain nameless …
Finally, I would also like an option to say “I always trust this reviewer” which means “From my perspective, ‘delete’ (do not show me) any files for which this reviewer rates a 1.” It would also be reflected in the ratings that I see for a file. Then some files that some consider trolling spam could at least be hidden from view, since they distract from the good stuff on the File Exchange.
Oh, and one other thing … I would like to be able to do a search *inside* a file. Such as “give me a list of all the files that use the “sparse” function. This search should be context senstive (such as the ability to search just M-code, not comments, since some MATLAB commands are common English words … “find”, “any”, etc).
Thanks for the comments Tim. Those are some good ideas. We are working on some improvements that will make consistently poorly-rated submissions less visible.
In the meantime, here’s a search that I like:
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/?term=ratepair:679/4
As you say, John D’Errico does great work reviewing files. This search is sort of the inverse of what you asked for. It returns every submission that John gave 4 or 5 stars to (since we rolled out the new version of the File Exchange). Right now there are six files that match that criterion, and half of them are yours!
Ah … and you wonder why I’d vote for John’s reviews ;-) …
That’s a neat feature … I hadn’t seen that yet. None of my files show up in the following search, fortunately ;-):
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/?term=ratepair%3A908%2F4
Also … and this is even more serious. Since the rolling out of the new interface to the Newsgroup / File Exchange / etc, there has been a noted dearth of tag:humor:
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/newsreader/search_results?search_string=tag%3Ahumor
The last tag:humor was from (appropriately enough) John D’Errico, in early August.
Has everyone suddenly gotten too serious! Oh no! We need some serious efforts in lightening up, guys!