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Feature Musings
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bgclarke
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Aug 2006
Status: Offline
Jun 10, 2006, 12:10 PM
 
I'm very new to Delicious Library and these are my musings after using it for only an hour or so. I've tried to find comments similar to mine on these boards that I could add my voice to, rather than start a new post, but in most cases I found nothing or simply felt the idea was worth repeating.

Before I continue, I just want to emphasise how I really like this program so I don't want anyone to fixate upon the fact I'm being Mr. Negative. It's simply that I tried it, I liked it but there were a few things I felt I wanted to be able to do but couldn't. In no particular order those issues were:

1) Search for sub-strings using the voice search microphone. I only got my iSight yesterday but I've got a few DVDs, games etc. in DL and the voice searching works reasonably well but it only appears to work off full titles? I have the Gamecube game "Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds" and I can't get to that for love nor money. I scanned in my "Anger Management" DVD and it adds "[2003]" (or somesuch) to the title which appears to stop me switching to it vocally.

I'd love if I could vocalise "Buffy" and it find that title, ditto "Management", if they were the only title that matches. This leads me onto...

2) Multiple matches. If I am in my books category and use the search that sits underneath the shelf and type "Stross" it will filter out all my books which don't match "Stross" in the author etc. and leave two books on the shelf [in my case]. That's great. Why doesn't the voice search work this way? I appreciate there might be technical issues but, as a dumb user, it makes no sense.

I think text and voice searches should both try to match whatever you vocalise/type.

3) Inconsistent search behaviour. If I am looking at my bookshelf and I say "Go" into the voice search microphone it moves to my DVD shelf and highlights my "Go" DVD. Excellent.

If I am looking at my bookshelf and type "Go" into the search control, it shows an empty bookshelf as I have no books which match. Why doesn't it search my other categories? Bad. Not only is it not what I'd want, it's also inconsistent to other behaviour of the program.

PS. Apologies if some of my wishes are achievable in the current version (1.6.2 v5077) but please let me know how I can do so.
     
foodog
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jul 2006
Status: Offline
Jun 11, 2006, 10:10 PM
 
You'll be pleased to note we had quite a conversation about your post here at DMHQ.

Voice search and Spotlight are two different technologies. We have to literally register everything phrase we want voice search to find. However, we generally agree with your sentiment that "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" should pull up "Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Dr. Raven Darktalon Blood" or whatever, so we've filed a bug and will try to work out something for a future version.

As a workaround, by the way, you can edit the title. You might not want to do that for Buffy, but editing the [2003] out of "Anger Management" seems like a good idea. I know, Delicious Library should read your mind and whiten your teeth while you sleep, but sometime you've got to help it along.

On the other hand, I'm going to have to disagree with you on point 3. "It's not a bug, it's a feature" that Delicious Library is able to limit your scope to one, several, or all of your collections. If you want to find the movie "Go," don't look for it in books. If you want to find any item called "Go," highlight all your collections.

Or use the main Spotlight window.

Or use the search widget.

That is to say, there are options, but we're not likely to change this behavior, because we'd have a thousand people complaining they searched their books for a primer on the classical Japanese game and came up with some Doug Liman movie.

-Mike
     
bgclarke  (op)
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Aug 2006
Status: Offline
Jun 12, 2006, 04:23 AM
 
First up, thank you for taking the time to reply!

I do appreciate you sometimes have to work with the software to achieve the desired results so I had already removed the "[2003]" suffix from the Anger Management title even though my teeth are looking a little whiter lately. However, as you rightly point out, I didn't want to do so for the Buffy game.

It seems unfortunate that you have to register phrases for voice searching as that sounds like there's no chance of being able use a voice search to match multiple items which you didn't really mention in your reply. I guess the same also applies to being able to find items in your collection by vocalising text from a sub-field, e.g. the author of a book? Out of curiosity, what would happen if I did a voice search for a title that existed in more than one collection, e.g. if I had "I, Robot" in my book and film collection?

Regarding my last point about the typed search not going across collections, it wasn't that I felt the text search not working across collections was a bug. It was simply that I felt the two methods of searching should operate in as similar method as possible. Given your comments, though, I can see how they are never going to be identical due to underlying voice search mechanism so I'm happy enough with that. Very magnanimous, me. :-)
     
 
   
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