find/replace behavior

[Andrew Abernathy]

On Apr 4, 2005, at 3:31 PM, Paul M. Hudy wrote:

> ....but apparently I have uncovered a great philosophical debate in 
> the UI field and also have far too much time on my hands! ;-)

I'm not sure that what you're saying is all that controversial. I was 
confused about this initially, but Greg's email was touching on a 
couple of issues that are distinct: 1) what the buttons should be 
labeled, and 2) the current pattern of use. He wasn't actually saying 
that the pattern couldn't be improved.

I'm inclined to agree that the button labels are appropriate as they 
are (at least, I haven't heard of or thought of something that I think 
is better, and as Greg pointed out, they match the example in Apple's 
human interface guidelines, not to mention a number of other 
applications). However, some behavioral changes seem appropriate, and 
they would likely clarify things.

If you examine the behavior in Mail, you'll find that the "replace" and 
"replace & find" buttons don't do anything if the current selection 
does not match the find string. That's good as far as it goes, but to 
reduce confusion I think that those buttons should actually be disabled 
in that case.

No promises as to exactly what we'll do - we want to try to think 
through any user interaction issues pretty carefully. (And there is a 
code complexity issue as well as potential performance impact, because 
the Find panel will have to stay up-to-date with the current selection 
at all times - if we just adopted Mail's behavior, it would be much 
easier and wouldn't have any performance impact.) We will look into 
this.

-andrew