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Search is only global if no projects are selected. I understand why - you want to allow constriction of search to specific projects.

But it's counter-intuitive for newbies. I kept searching for an action I knew existed but it wouldn't turn up....until I clicked in white space in the project panel to clear the selection.

One rough way out would be this: in search results page, if the search was constrained to specific projects, you present a statement (in fairly unobtrusive font) atop the results ala: "You have searched for XXX in the project/projects selected at left"

This will be really help newbie users who can't understand why they're getting no hits, as in the absence of search results this would be highly visible as the only text in the panel.

Last edited by Eric Schoenfeld; 2008-01-13 at 07:30 AM.. Reason: clarity
 
+1 on this. This is the first time I've ever had to come to the forums for troubleshooting help.

Had no idea that you had to have nothing selected to do a global search...very counterintuitive imho.

Ashicap

Last edited by ashicap; 2008-02-26 at 02:42 PM.. Reason: title not included in text, why have the box if it's not printed.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by ashicap View Post
Had no idea that you had to have nothing selected to do a global search...very counterintuitive imho.
Actually, I think the search mechanism always searches whatever is shown in the content area. So you can select the Library folder, or any other folder. It just so happens that, by default, the entire Library is displayed if nothing is selected in the sidebar.

This behavior is quite common among OS X apps (e.g. iTunes, iPhoto, Yojimbo, etc.). It seems perfectly logical to me, but I can understand how someone new to the system might be confused.

Apple's done a nice job mitigating these problems in some apps like Mail and Finder, where an item selected in the sidebar shows up as an option in a bar at the top of the window, but the whole data source is searched by default. Only by selecting an option from the bar is the search narrowed to the sidebar selection. In this example, I had my "Mailing Lists" folder selected in Mail's sidebar.

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The good news is that Omni Group has acknowledged this concern in at least one other thread and is supposedly planning some UI changes in a future release to search the entire database by default but still allow narrowed searches on sidebar selections. I'm not sure how exactly they plan to implement that, though, or how it will end up looking once it gets to us.

Last edited by Toadling; 2008-02-26 at 04:46 PM..
 
hmm if you take the osx ui concept of mail as basis for narrowing down searches it would be an option to have the tag whole db and then as options the different perspectives for searching.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kosjer D View Post
hmm if you take the osx ui concept of mail as basis for narrowing down searches it would be an option to have the tag whole db and then as options the different perspectives for searching.
Not by perspective but rather by sidebar folder or project. So if you had an item selected in the sidebar and did a search, a bar at the top of the content area would appear and provide options to search the entire Library (selected by default) or just the item that was selected in the sidebar when you initiated the search.

Again, this is not necessarily how Omni Group plans to implement this feature. It's just an example of how it might work. I don't know what Omni's plans are other than they said they were working on it.
 
 


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