Re: search categories in beagle-search

[drago01 <drago01 gmail com>]

On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 6:49 PM, D Bera <dbera web gmail com> wrote:
> Hey,
>   Beagle-search used to include a "search scope" menu to choose the
> type of data to search. My experience is that this menu often got
> ignored. I decided to make the category chooser more visible by
> putting it beside the input box. I am hoping that users will now use
> this more and get faster and fewer results. There was also an inherent
> slow path in the earlier implementation; beagle-search will feel a bit
> quicker now.
>
>   However I am not sure if this UI change is a good idea or even an
> improvement over the earlier. I tend to clutter GUIs by displaying all
> the possible options (y'no' ... like one of the other DEs). I am
> attaching two screenshots; scope-combobox.jpg shows the new UI and
> scope-menu.jpg shows the old UI. The changes are also available in the
> svn trunk. Try the svn trunk, take a look at the screenshots. I would
> really appreciate some feedback.
>
>   There is one more hurdle to cross before users can benefit from
> choosing a category for searching; currently even though there are
> results from only one category, not all the space is used. This
> sometimes forces the users to press the forward/back arrows even
> though there is ample space in to show all the results. There is a bug
> report opened on this, and I think it also has a few rejected patches.
> Apparently this is a hard problem to solve given the way the results
> are now displayed in beagle-search. Anyone willing to learn Gtk should
> benefit a lot by working on this problem :-D.
>
> Thanks in advance for your time and feedback,
> - dBera

I would opt for the new one (the UI does not look that bad) .. the old
one is hiden in the menu so that almost nobody even knows that it
exists.