[IxDA Discuss] Fitts Law fits

[Pierre Abel]

Hi Alan,

Concerning the needs to find an item by its name, did you consider using 
a "search as you type" field that filters the tree ? I mean like in 
ITunes that allows to find quickly a song via  its name/its artists/the 
album name/... by hidding the songs which meta-data  do not match the 
search field.  In your case, as soon as a node or leaf name and 
meta-data (don't restrict to only the name of the tree nodes) matches 
the search field, the tree branch must displayed and opened (and 
possibly the node that match is displayed in bold)..others tree branch 
are completely hidden. . I've seen this interaction in Eclipse: its is 
used in its preferences window where there is a lot of things...I found 
it well suited for the task of searching by name  ( one problem in 
Eclipse is that  the filtering is restricted to the name of the nodes 
and do not apply on the leaf content ...)

Concerning the scanning, did you consider using a "column view" instead 
of a "tree view" such as in (Apple one more time!) in Mac OSX Finder 
(check it out in 
http://www.dummies.com/WileyCDA/DummiesArticle/id-1651.html) ? 
Personnaly, I don't like it very in Finder because I always have some 
resizing issues, but if you have a tree depth that is fixed, it can 
perhaps do the trick . (note that in this case, "search as you type" 
won't work!!)

Hope its helps !

Pierre