[1] Beagle grew out of Dashboard,[2] an early Mono-based application for watching and presenting useful information from a user's computer.

Beagle includes a Gtk#-based user interface, and integrates with Galago for presence information.

Beagle was developed and maintained by Joe Shaw with help from the open source community.

Notable contributors included Jon Trowbridge, Robert Love, Nat Friedman and David Camp.

On Linux, Beagle efficiently indexes documents using inotify without the need for frequent reindexing.