Nope. The thing is, I do not consider it a convenience at all.
Myself, I consider it an unnecessary and often counter-productive
show-off.
I thought showing off was the cornerstone of Mac OS X development? ;)
Reasons? Plain: in my experience of many years of using indexing
tools -- beginning with the Digital Librarian which used to be great
and alas was trashed by Apple when they bought NeXTStep -- much more
often I want "all documents containing 'weirdo'" than "all 'weirdo'
occurrences", if you can see the difference.
True, but spotlight gives you the list itself so your application is
left handling the opened file. Or in some cases, files. Either way, the
search for documents was done by someone else and now we just help to
get to the relevant area of those documents.
And, just again, if the latter happens to be what I really want, I
have to put my fingers at Commad-g anyway, since the probability it
would be the second or later hit is considerable. Therefore, the
"inconvenience" of having to press the Command-g for the first
occurrence is completely negligible.
True, but this importer is for IRC logs, so the usage case I had in
mind was that choice quote a user made, an explanation of something
related to the search, or just a url I happen to be looknig for. In
these instances even though it's possible I might need to continue my
search, chances are the first hit might be what I'm looking for. And if
not, cmd-g is still our friend.
On the other hand, the advantage to see immediately the document
beginning -- which often tends to give more information about the
document and a better indication whether this actually is what I want
than the actual search term occurrence -- is much more important.
For real documents, yes, for logs, not so much.
Note: selecting (or emphasizing a different way) all the occurrences
of the search string is good IMHO, as I've said originally ("if you
want to perform a more sophisticated action", or something like that
I wrote). What is in my personal opinion wrong is just to perform
plain "Find Next".
Actually the whole find was overriden a while ago, the first occurence is selected and the rest are highlighted.
> then we obviously disagree as far as following the HI guidelines,
> and User Interface in general.
The thing is, HIG can be wrong, and sometimes indeed is.
It can be proven left-side sliders are (for left-to-right scripts)
better than right-side ones. What about tear-off menus: why did they
vanish? What about the pop-up main menu wherever the mouse is (would
be even more important on today's 30" vast displays than it used to
be before), or a dock which keeps icons at their places allowing you
to learn to click at the very same point each time you wanna to
launch TextEdit? Do you really think that not to be able to re-size a
window by any edge is reasonable, despite what HIG may tell us? Come on.
Despite yoru examples, I'm biased to the opposite of all your arguments. Not that they don't work for you, but that's not how the system works, so working against it isn't in the cards.
Add the fact Apple does not conform to HIG themselves whenever they
consider it reasonable (an excellent example is the selection which
kind of windows should use brushed metal look).
Metal is Apple pet UI to piss off and annoy, we can't do much about it.
I am very positive it's much better to use a reason and judgement. Of
course, if they agree with the HIG, the better. And I do fully accept
the argument "better consistent and somewhat wrong than excellent but
vastly inconsistent"; just there's the other side which says "better
to be slightly inconsistent and considerably better, than to be
consistent and wrong both".
Yes, slightly inconsistent and considerably better is the better
trade-off, but the fun is in the considerably better, the path to it
isn't always the same though.
'Nuff said, I guess :)
Agreed.
-Karl