Re: Fun, relatively simple feature help

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
>
> To give some context, the general idea is an equivalent to the "press
> first letter of a row to go to that row" feature.

Actually, in Windows at least, this feature offers more than that-- you
can type the first 'n' characters of a word, and it will go to the first
matching row that starts with those first 'n' characters.  This is a lot
more useful than just matching on the first character alone.

While the "C-s" search facility might be useful in some cases, my guess
is that the vast majority of uses for the TreeView will be so simple
that you'd never want or need to use it.  Given that, I have to wonder
whether it's really something that ought to be part of the TreeView
control itself, as the applications where people really need a search
facility will usually be of a relatively complex nature (spreadsheet,
file manager etc.) and ought to implement their own specific (and
hopefully more useful) search facility anyway.  

(Perhaps what's really needed is a simple "common search dialog" widget
that can be subclassed/extended for each app's (and the TreeView's) own
purposes, rather than trying to build a custom one one right into the
TreeView?)

Anyway, I'd humbly suggest that it's more important that the TreeView
actually works well and is fully keyboard accessible etc. before we even
think about adding this sort of stuff--  tree controls usually come out
top of the "confusing" stakes in usability tests as it is, without
piling in all the functionality we can think of.  But then again, I'm
just boring and old-fashioned  :o)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems