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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: kfind issues
From:       "Jamethiel Knorth" <jamethknorth () hotmail ! com>
Date:       2004-02-28 15:22:32
Message-ID: BAY7-F97B7tPZMzIl560001ea54 () hotmail ! com
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>From: Dik Takken <D.H.J.Takken@phys.uu.nl>
>Reply-To: KDE Usability Project <kde-usability@kde.org>
>
>On Fri, 27 Feb 2004, Jamethiel Knorth wrote:
>
> > > > * Find all PDF files with more than 10 pages in it
> > > > * Find a picture called image.jpg of dimensions 1024x768
> > > > * Find all avi video's that use the XVid codec
> > > > * Find a KWord document containing the phrase "KDE is Cool"
> > > > * Find all pictures that look similar to a picture provided by the 
>user.
> > >All good ideas :-)
> > >
> > >So let's start brainstorming...
> > >
> > >Alex
> >
> > I love all these ideas, but would suggest that, if any more options are
> > being added, the tool needs to be split into 'basic search' and 
>'advanced
> > search'. Normally, I hate advanced sections, but users are fairly well
> > adjusted to the idea in searches.
>
>Yes, I think that's a requirement.
>
> > If they hit advanced search, it switches to
> > the more powerful search interface with lots of options
>
>I don't think the new KFind possibilities should be put in a advanced
>section. It's a bit more complicated than you might think. You see, you
>can build a new and much more intuitive way of searching with the
>possibiliies that you call 'Advanced'.
>
>There is a BIG difference between what *we* would call 'Advanced search'
>and what the average computer user would call 'Advanced Search'. For
>example, the average computer user would love to search a picture by
>describing what it looked like. That would be the most natural
>way to search, it's in no way 'Advanced'. A developer would call it
>'Advanced', because it's technically advanced. For the developer,
>searching by filename and size with lots of wildcards is the
>natural way to go. The average computer user may have no idea about the
>filesize of the picture he is looking for and don't know anything about
>wildcards and regular expressions. He would call the developer's
>method 'Advanced'.
>
>I think you could say that, for the majority of computer users, a natural
>search application allows the user to search for file properties that he
>is likely to remember, like the color of a picture, the fact that it
>looked like a line-drawing, the author of the document, or a phrase of
>text. I would like to call such properties 'natural properties'. Of
>course, the file name is also a quite natural property, but it's only one
>of many.
>
>So, you could also plead for a search interface that focusses primarily on
>natural properties in stead. The developer type of user will choose
>'Advanced' and type a smart search string with regular expressions and
>stuff. Probably he might even never use KFind, and use
>the UNIX commandline in stead. True, KFind can do nothing more
>than the 'find' command anyway.
>

My suggestion was that the 'Basic' Search support searching by directory 
location in filenames, metadata, and full-text with the search line not 
calling for the words to be in any particular order. However, it wouldn't 
have support for searching with regular expressions or picture matches. The 
main reason is that they would need a picture handy to use the picture 
matching. That's most of the a natural options.

The reason I don't want to include the number of pages or image size is that 
all those options are specific to one file-type. Possibly add a combo-box 
for what type of file they want to search for (Document, Image, Video, 
Music, etc...) and give that some options based on context (# of pages, 
image size, song length, etc...)?

The difficult issue there is making certain the users don't have too many 
options, because that makes the search tools slower to use, and it is 
important for the search tool to be swiftly available.

>Just some stuff to think about.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Dik
>
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