Search as you type and similarly convenient functions to help one find stuff

Started by Alexander Deliyannis on 1/13/2013
Alexander Deliyannis 1/13/2013 9:59 am
(copied from another thread)

MadaboutDana wrote:
I shall check out the search function to start with - that's always a sine qua non for me.

Bill, not to further excite your CRIMPing tendencies, but since search is so important to you, I wonder whether you ever came across Notelens http://windsorinterfaces.com/notelens.shtml

Notelens is part of the work of professor Ben Bederson who, among others, explored zoomable interfaces to facilitate human-computer interaction. I've written in the past here on DateLens, which I have personally found the best interface for a calendar. The other example is PhotoMesa, used to organise large quantities of images.

Notelens itself is not zoomable, but it offers very fast search-as-you-type. It might be worth checking out. I remember that at the time I used to work a lot with Greek, and Notelens did not index it (probably didn't handle it all), so I uninstalled it quite quickly.

All three programs offered by Bederson's former company Windsor Interfaces are now free; apparently they did not meet with the commercial success expected. They were all built around Windows 98 time, but I've used Datelens at least with much newer versions of Windows with no problem.

I started this new thread because it seems to me that search-as-you-type and zooming are very useful functions to help one find stuff. It may be worth gathering tools that offer such features under one thread.
Franz Grieser 1/13/2013 9:23 pm
I started this new thread because it seems to me that search-as-you-type
and zooming are very useful functions to help one find stuff. It may be
worth gathering tools that offer such features under one thread.

Speaking about start-searching-as-you-type: That`s the reason I used Infoselect for many years (just reinstalled vs9 to get old data out). I don't know about an idea database tool that offers that useful feature.

Franz