On 24-05-2013, at 3:39 PM, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:

> Tim, I assume you're using the new list-filtering feature I put in
> last year?  Just give any list of classes, categories, methods, etc.
> focus and then start typing.

Nope, because I had never heard of that and there isn't anything immediately cluing me in about it. That's a common issue with UI stuff - how to make it easy to use once you know of it whilst making it easy to find when you don't. Even though a visible search field would strictly speaking add clutter, it also adds that vital affordance.

>  Is there something that could be done to
> improve that function that would satisfy you?

As a general idea for lists it's quite interesting and effective. I'm not sure the balance of when to stop adding new typing to the pattern or when to start a new pattern is worked out well enough; I found it a bit disconcerting that if I hesitated a fraction it started a new search. The background colour change as an indicator is nice.

The real problem is that the list I want to search in this scenario is one that doesn't strictly exist within the browser, so your code can't get me the answer I need. 

> 
> Also, have you considered setting the "alternativeBrowseIt"
> preference?  Thanks to that preference, I haven't needed "find
> class..." in a decade.
> 
> Whereever I'm typing or, sometimes even in the Annotation pane, I'll
> type a partial-match name of any class, press Command+B and the system
> quickly(?) presents a list of matching classes (substring matching).
> Even better, I'm now browsing the *code* model rather than the package
> model, which is a much rarer need.

Whilst that is very useful it still has a problem on a slow-ish machine in that it opens another browser window. This both takes time and continues to steal time later due to good ol'Morphic and it's anti-social habits. I don't recall if you said you have Pi to play with but it's always a good thing to have a 'different' machine to try stuff out on occasionally. Over the decades it's constantly surprised me how tricky is can be to make UIs work well across even a mere 2-3x speed factor, let alone 10-20x. And everyone ought to have a little experience of a notably different OS (for example RISC OS) just as a reminder that not everything can be fudged to be POSIX complaint. (sic)


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Fractured Idiom:- LE ROI EST MORT. JIVE LE ROI - The King is dead.  No kidding.