KDE SC 4.5 will be out soon and as mentioned in an earlier blog entry, for Dolphin this release has been used to do bugfixing, polishing and internal cleanups of the code. I'm quite happy with the result, however last week I decided to have some fun again and have started to improve the search interface of Dolphin (will be part of KDE SC 4.6).
History
Although it was already possible to search also for tags, ratings and other kind of data, it was nearly unfeasible for users to discover this functionality. In KDE SC 4.4 I tried to improve this by showing some search options as soon as the user clicks into the searchbox:
By clicking on the green (+)-button, it was possible to specify the searching in a very detailed manner:
Problem #1
When I started to write this (quite complex) user interface, Sebastian Trüg already told me about his concerns, that this kind of user interface might not be the best approach. Well, I still thought that I need to provide something for the users to allow them more specific searches; the feature freeze for 4.4 was near and so I finalized the implementation for this interface.
But Sebastian was right: It turned out, that nearly nobody uses this (+)-button at all. It just takes way too many clicks to specify a query. A better approach is something like Alessandro Sivieri implemented in his semantic browser: Just provide basic filters, that allow the user gradually to decrease the number of found files if necessary.
Problem #2
Another issue is the distinction between searching indexed files with Nepomuk by the searchbox...
... and searching non-indexed files with the KFind shortcut in Dolphin:
Most users out there don't care about whether a file is indexed or not, so I tried to solve those two problems during the last week.
Improvements
When pressing the Strg+F shortcut (I don't know yet, whether "Find" should be part of the default toolbar setup), Dolphin changes from:
to:
Not really revolutionary of course, but I like it that the breadcrumb gets replaced by the searchbox and hence no space is required anymore in the toolbar for the searchbox. The nice thing is that this searchbox integrates the KFind functionality and the Nepomuk searching in one interface. It is automatically detected internally, whether the current folder is indexed or not. Needless to say that for non-indexed folders it takes longer to query for e. g. all texts that have the word "test" inside, but it works. Also without Nepomuk it is of course not possible to query for files, that have a specific rating. But as soon as Nepomuk is available and the current folder is in the index, a filter-button is available on the right side. When pressing the filter-button, the searchbox gets extended:
The interface of those extensions is just a prototype currently, but the basic idea is similar to Alessandro Sivieri's semantic browser: Just allow the user with less clicks to minimize the search results after doing a search by activating a filter. E. g. pressing on the "Home" tag will limit the search result to files that have been tagged with "Home". Although this does not sound very different in the first sight, it is a huge difference when trying it out yourself.
For me personally the ability to search also on non-indexed folders is a big win: In my development environment I don't have indexed my sources, still I often require to grep for some strings in source files. So instead of using the terminal I now can use Dolphin for it :-)
