another suggestion for query UI

[Warren Baird <photogeekmtl gmail com>]

Let me start off by saying I don't like Lotus Notes much - we use it at 
work for email and bug tracking and other tasks, and it's kinda 
annoying.   However, I think we might be able to take some inspiration 
from it's search mechanism.

The simple search panel is a single text widget - you can enter a simple 
string like "Fred", and it shows all items matching 'Fred' in any field 
(tag, comment, etc.)  You can also enter more complicated search queries 
using a simple language - basically components like "<data field> 
<criteria> <value>" joined together with AND, OR, NOT, ( and ).

If you then open the advanced window, you can get a dialog that lets you 
edit each component individually, and save and load searches, etc.

I've attached a snapshot showing roughly how this might look for us.

I think I'd like some variant of this better than my previous suggestion 
- it gives a little more flexibility.  We could also incorporate DnD - 
dragging a tag to the text window could automatically add "tag contains 
<tag name>" to the query (with an AND or an OR depending on what we decide.)

It also means that there's no difference between the richness of the 
queries specified through the advanced panel and the text widget.

I guess you could combine the two proposals as well - if the text widget 
uses language like this, you could still display it one component per 
row in the advanced panel, like iPhoto does...

Any comments?

Warren