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Previous: Logitech's "special price" | Main | Next: Japanese warning signs
February 18, 2005 12:09 AM
Broken: Windows search box
Bryan Klimt asks: "Which folder do you think I should search in?"
Uh...the "resize" corner is visible in the screenshot. All a person has to do is click-and-hold the left mouse button and press the right arrow key on the keyboard to expand the suggestion list toward the right, and then press the enter key without letting go of the mouse button. (If you care to be a bit more random, you can just drag the corner with the mouse only, too.)
The last answer is right, but this is - at least - a bad solution. Most OSes have a search function with this field much larger than this.
"Uh...the "resize" corner is visible in the screenshot."
A useless default is a broken UI. If I have to resize it to make it useful, it should start off bigger to begin with.
Definitely a PEBKAC. You can also resize the search pane to make it much wider. When you do that, the folder menu gets wider as well.
The alternative to doing it this way is to have the popup box like they did in previous versions of Windows. I wasn't involved in the design process, but I would figure that Microsoft decided it would be most intuitive to have the search criteria on the left and the search results appear on the right.
To say this is broken is just laziness on the part of the user.
"A useless default is a broken UI"
definitely true.. this is surely broken.
of course you can fix it, but you shouldn't have to.
Is it broken or is it laziness? It depends on what level of usability one wants to accept in a user interface. Yes, one can resize the dropdown list. But given that the control has a list of the elements that are to form the dropdown, why not size the list to accomodate the longest element? By the way, the Windows Start menu does this. You can check for yourself by adding a shortcut to the start menu with a long name. It will size the list to accomodate the long shortcut you added.
Hrm. The version of WindowsXP I'm currently using (Pro, SP2) sizes that particular drop-down (as well as the others in that window) to fit the longest element.
This is most probably just a result of Microsoft wanting to make the search function fit into a search pane on the left of the window. They probably fixed it in SP2.
This is broken in Windows in general. Many dialogs like this are NOT resizable. And something like this should size itself. I know in the Mac the API has a function to figure the pixel width of a string amongst other helpful tools. Windows must have something like this. That's, like, three lines of code to get a decent estimate of how wide the menu should be and pad it a bit?
A related problem is the popup with, say, 20 entries, but it will show only 5 or 6 and give me a scrollbar when I have a 24 freaking inch monitor in front of me.
"...it will show only 5 or 6 and give me a scrollbar when I have a 24 freaking inch monitor in front of me."
That IS broken. Getting a smaller monitor will fix the problem.
:-)
You do realise that the full path for each is displayed when you mouse over it.
This isn't broken at all.
Why the extra action of mouseovers when there is already a precedent for other controls where they simply display the whole thing?
If:
- the narrow default width is desired for layout reasons
- you can see the path with a mouseover
- it's easily predictable that
then why not put the folder name in the list instead of the path in the first place?
(Not that I consider that a complete solution, because if you've got more than one folder with the same name, you still have to somehow magically intuit that a mouseover will show you the path [and don't bother telling me that "everyone who's anyone will know that already", please, unless this app's audience is restricted to experienced Windows users]. But it's better than what's there now.)
To those who say it resizes automatically:
The screenshot is of the AutoComplete box, NOT the drop-down box.
Aha! I see, now. Thanks for pointing that out, Shadow. I'd never tried typing in that box. Those who said that a mouse-over shows the whole name are incorrect, too, it would appear. And, jaed's potential solution is no longer really applicable either, because you'd type the whole path, and the program isn't going to be able to intuit which folder you meant, using just a sub-folder name. This ought to resize to fit the width of the item just like the drop-down box does. I wonder if the auto-complete boxes on websites in IE are broken, too.
If it auto-resized, you'd have to resize it again if you typed in a really long directory name, just so you could see the search results.
Maybe Microsoft should put it on the top of the screen, like in 98.
There is another way in which it is broken.
1. The drop-down combo box entries show C:\Documents and Settings\[I assume] some user\My Documents etc. But that's not how it's presented elsewhere in the UI, where care is taken to present My Documents as My Documents, not the long trip through the filesystem.
2. Yes, there is an API to get the text length; in fact it is very much encouraged as in complex scripts (Arabic mainly) one cannot deduce the text width by adding the widths of characters, not even adjusting for kerning.
3. From the programmer's point of view, Windows combo boxes do not automatically size for width or height. Bad bad bad. Lazy programmers thus don't add the required boilerplate code to make them do this.
4. I agree all windows should be sizeable.
resize the search window. then it will sasy stuff like C:/Documents and Settings:/Documents. DUH!!!!!
Windows is a crappy OS!
Just dont use it!
If viewing websites can make your OS crash (I.E. Getting malware from a website) then its not a good OS.
use UNIX or Linux.
Comments on this entry are closed
Previous: Logitech's "special price" | Main | Next: Japanese warning signs
The right one.
Posted by: TheRightOne at February 18, 2005 02:12 AM