Would there ever be any plans to introduce an Advanced Search feature? The kind of thing I have in mind is, for example, searching for a movie that is under 100 minutes long, has won an Oscar and is in my 5 Star rating collection. Currently, I can do this, of course, with Smart Collections, but it would be great to have a search capability that allowed it without having to create a Smart Collection just for the search.
Translating an English phrased search into one that the computer can execute is a very exciting field of research and one that Apple is working on. Hopefully a quick search without having to establish set of rules (smart collections) will be easier for Mac programmers in future OS X using some Apple supplied frameworks. At the moment doing this kind of search would mean the end user would have to know quite a lot about of the technicalities. Your search would be something like "duration < 100 AND awards != nil AND myRating == 5" and hence is not enabled due to the complexity.
Conor wrote:Translating an English phrased search into one that the computer can execute is a very exciting field of research and one that Apple is working on. Hopefully a quick search without having to establish set of rules (smart collections) will be easier for Mac programmers in future OS X using some Apple supplied frameworks. At the moment doing this kind of search would mean the end user would have to know quite a lot about of the technicalities. Your search would be something like "duration < 100 AND awards != nil AND myRating == 5" and hence is not enabled due to the complexity.
Ah yes - good point that I kinda knew but had failed to take on board. In my example, it's easy for me here because I picked an example that used items already in existing smart collections - Oscars, 5 Star, Short Movies (the last for when I just *have* to watch a movie before going to bed but it's already midnight ).
That raises a point - would it be easier to do an Advanced Search *existing collections* pane? That's all I'm doing - in my example, I create a smart collection and select 'movies in collection xxxx', movies in collection yyyy', movies in collection zzzz' and select ALL. Then when I'm through I delete the smart collection if I think I won't likely use it again.
A smart collection is an advance search except that you have the extra step of having to delete the collection when done. I don't think it's worth cluttering the interface with an advance search option to save that one last delete step. Thank you for the suggestion and it's also something other users might have not know is possible to do with the smart collections.
Conor wrote:A smart collection is an advance search except that you have the extra step of having to delete the collection when done. I don't think it's worth cluttering the interface with an advance search option to save that one last delete step. Thank you for the suggestion and it's also something other users might have not know is possible to do with the smart collections.
