FU: Findability precedes Usability.

I use the Janus GridEx Grid control every day. And they have thousands and thousands of properties. You get lost looking through them.

What I'd like to see is a little textbox at the top of the "Control Designer" form (the form that lists these thousands of properties). Whatever you type in this text box is searched for and highlighted amongst the property names and values.

Aww i can't explain this good. Check out the screen shot I mocked up:

See -- i typed "Edit" in the little (fake) textbox at the top of the form. And then the word "Edit" was highlighted where it appears in the properties.

Damn this would save me some time. And everyone else who works with complex property pages.

(by the way, i think 'Findability precedes Usability' is a quote from Peter Morville. I am certain that it is available as a bumper sticker from Confusability [a usability blog])

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'Haacked' on Tue, 13 Dec 2005 02:55:05 GMT, sez:

That would make me jump up and down and shoot sparks out my arse. I would definitely find that useful.

In general, any thing that might have too many options can make use of it.

'Tulio Serpio' on Tue, 13 Dec 2005 09:55:11 GMT, sez:

why not a filter, like about:config in firefox?

'marty' on Wed, 14 Dec 2005 22:44:44 GMT, sez:

Wow.. did you see this at Coding Horror:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000467.html

Not the same, but it's a Search routine built into the Options page for Toad for SQL Server.

'Al' on Thu, 15 Dec 2005 08:36:19 GMT, sez:

I guess it is a problem of choice - too much of it. I hate scrolling through long lists of properties, in a lot of cases it is easier to just use intellisense.

'sg' on Thu, 15 Dec 2005 20:03:25 GMT, sez:

Thanks Haaacked, Tulio, marty et al. (he he)

funny that Jeff at Coding Horror wrote about a similar problem.

Thanks for pointing out the filter in firefox, Tulio. That's a pretty good feature. I think filtering out the results would be a bit extreme for something like the Janus properties explorer.

intellisense -- though excellent -- doesn't quite help in this case because say if you're looking for 'Edit' -- you wouldn't know to type in "Auto..." and bring up "AutoEdit".

interesting though -- what if intellisense had a search filter built into it? i feel a blog entry coming on...
lb

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