Dan Mosedale wrote:
> It would be interesting to see any GUI ideas you have.
See my post dated Thu, 8 Mar 2001 08:31:49 -0800 (PST) where I quoted
MPT's ASCII art.
(I'm sub'd via email so I don't have a link to the usenet post)
> To be clear, though, we're talking about searching in addressbooks at
> this point, not mail filters. And it seems likely that this isn't
> worth worrying about UI for, at least initially, since I suspect that
> only real power-users (or other clients of the directory search code)
> are going to need or want to do sophisticated addressbook searches.
The above referenced ASCII art is designed with mail filters in mind.
However, I think it represents a good general-purpose method for
designing a query. With the recent discussion of design implementation,
the same code and GUI could server for address book searches, message
searches & mail filters. Even though the design allows for rather
complex rules, it doesn't have to intimidate novice users. For address
book searches, the initial query could default to "Name", "contains",
<blank>. This would make the most common type of search very quick to
use... fill in the blank and click search.
Granted, I doubt even most power users will be searching their address
books using extremely complex search criteria. But if the
infrastructure were in place to handle such queries, it would make sense
to have it apply (same GUI, same code) to address book searches. We're
going to want a GUI (and code) that can handle rather complex mail
filter rules, why bother to design a simpler one just for address book
searches... may as well design a general purpose search that can apply
to both of those and message searches.
</soapbox> (not sure where in there I got on it)
The Amigo
