Hi all,
this message is firstly for Square87; I just found your SearchContact
plugin on the fora... and I'm glad I found it as otherwise I would have
started making it. I wanted this feature for so long already. Great work.
I have some interface-related thoughts though; Tell me what you think of
it:
The icon on the left is nice as it shows what the input-field is for but
that's all it does .. I think it could have a function too, namely setting
the filter. In fact I don't like the choice of a combobox on the right
either. It also has several functions in 1 'menu' that do way different
stuff;
My proposition is al follows:
Have a search-icon on the left that acts like a button to open a menu. This
menu is like this:
('v' are tickboxes, o are radiobuttons)
----------------------------------------------
v Filter blocked contacts
v Filter contacts who removed me
----------------------------------------------
o Search all data
o Search nicknames
o Search e-mail adresses
o Search group-names
----------------------------------------------
For the "clear" function, I think it would be nice to have a small "clear"
button appearing on the right of the input-field once there's input.
Q [ ] -> look of the widget without input
Q [ amsn ] x -> look of the widget with input
This is how some apps I use do search (Banshee, Deskbar) and you can see
this also on mac software (iTunes' search bar or spotlight is an example).
The only thing these apps do different is that both the search-icon and the
clear icon are incapsulated IN the input widget (check screenshots if you
don't know what I mean). To do this we would be best of to create such a
search widget ourselves.
Another usability thing is keyboard use. Our CL-widget now ha no keyboard
bindings to scroll through contacts, which is a bad thing ... so this
search-plugin can't use this either .. but it would be a nice step in the
right direction if pressing "Enter" when only one contact is left on the
filtered list would open a chat with that contact. What do you think ?
Now, in general ... shouldn't this plugin be shipped by default on by aMSN
for the next release ? it's really awesome :)
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