My latest Times Online article is now available; entitled “Searching For Good Usability“, it uses Firefox’s Find As You Type function as an example of usability innovation.
My latest Times Online article is now available; entitled “Searching For Good Usability“, it uses Firefox’s Find As You Type function as an example of usability innovation.
Great article, Gerv.
I have turned on the setting in Firefox to start FAYT as soon as I start typing, without having to do CTRL+F. Wow, what a wonderful way to search. Quite regularly now, while reading a PDF document, or just working in some completely different application I will start typing a word or phrase only to realize… shoot, this application doesn’t have FAYT. To me, that has to be the ultimate measure of success in usabliity – when you unconsiously initiate the use of a feature in another application before you realize…blast, this feature is not (yet) supported in all applications.
You know the article has 2 popups? ;) (Blocked by Firefox, of course.)
Personally, I’ve been using FAYT in it’s earlier forms since Phoenix. Being able to type parts of the link names is _very_ handy, and having / to search for text is equally good. I’ve turned off automatic keystroke->search, though, as this breaks stuff like GMail. Now I use ‘ to search for links, and / for everything. Great stuff!
Oh, your Times Online articles have a commenting facility now? Is that a new feature or have I just not noticed it before? It’s interesting to watch traditional media s-l-o-w-l-y cottoning on to the idea that publishing online is more than just uploading pdfs of the print edition to the website!
John: I didn’t get any pop-ups… I doubt I could influence them either way on that score, anyway.
Individ-ewe-al: Yes, it seems to be a new feature. One more thing for me to keep an eye on :-)
The Emacs feature that I most want to see added to other software is grouping symbol matching. It would be somewhat useful in any text-editing situation (even textareas in a browser), but most especially I don’t see how any word processing application can in clear conscience omit it. It’s nearly as useful as spellcheck.