Re: The beginnings of an advanced query UI

[Debajyoti Bera <dbera web gmail com>]

> So, I think we all agree that while the system of text-based keywords
> for advanced queries can be extremely powerful, the issue of
> discoverability makes them more of a stepping stone to a graphical

Agreed. Good thinking there.

> Anyways, feel free to dismiss, to heckle, to praise, Just trying to
> think of a way to be something more than just searching text.... ;)

One thing (and possibly the only thing) I understood from the mockup is that 
you want every displayed information to be clickable and clicking them would 
refine the current search by adding that information. If that can be done 
without cluttering the UI (e.g. displaying the action icon only on hover), it 
might be useful without looking bad. Just a suggestion.

I did not really understand the other proposed changes. I am a bit UI 
challenged, so dont worry too much.

I want to mention in passing two things which bother me about the current GUI 
(during my brief testing sessions).

One thing which I really really dont like is that it uses the available space 
in a very bad way. The number of tiles are fixed and so enlarging the window 
makes the tiles look very sparse. This is probably tricky to do since it is 
hard to figure out how many tiles to display based on desktop size, dpi, 
font-size etc. but there is got to be some clever hack to achieve this.

The other thing is about adding some fanciness to the GUI. Gradients, shadows, 
sliding animations ... usual bling. Note that I am not hinting at meaningless 
effects here, but subtle one which draw the attraction of the user, make 
him/her aware of the different information and actions and make the actions 
look like real actions (not like a magic, here are the documents 1-8, you 
click here, they vanish and out of the blue appears document 9-12).

- dBera

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Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
beagle / KDE fan
Mandriva / Inspiron-1100 user