Contact Picker - Search string not highlighted in contact names

[John Lea]

In response to each letter being typed, the search sting should be highlighted in contact names. e.g. If I have a contact named "joe blogs" and I type "o" into the search field the letter "o" should be instantly made bold in the name ("jOe blOgs"). See specification (step 8 of primary scenairo) - http://use-case-mapper.canonical.com/specifications/0AU5sFuLRpCpBZGZra2pqY2pfMjYwZnhwMmptZjY/use_cases/2_1

[dobey (dobey)]

I think we probably want to only actually do a search when 3 characters have been typed in. Most software that does automatic search behaves this way (waiting for 3 characters), as single character searches often end up matching nearly every entry in one's contacts list.

There is of course exception to this rule for languages such as Mandarin, where a person's name may be only one character.

[dobey (dobey)]

Oh, and perhaps hilighting the characters in one's name might be overkill, given that we're also filtering down the list to only show those which match the search. So you will know all results in the list match that.

Also, what happens for matching on nicknames or other data, not directly in the view of contacts. Suppose I want to search for "all people in London" or 'all Canonical employees' for example?

[Rodrigo Moya (rodrigo-moya)]

Yes, we perform the search looking at all fields in the contacts, so if you search for 'canonical', there would be nothing to highlight in most contacts (only if you have some contact with the 'canonical' name on it, like a mailing list)

[John Lea (johnlea)]

As far as I am aware the standard 'incremental search' behaviour is to search on each letter including the 1st & 2nd letters. For examples see:

- http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
- sending a new message on facebook
- searching in a browser using Ctrl+F
- Spotlight on OSX
- Instant Search in Microsoft Vista and Windows 7
etc...

(for further background wikipedia provides, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_search)

Although typing a single letter will rarely produce a useful result, the actions that are performed as a result of the letter being entered (moving selected contacts to the top left, highlighting the letter in names, updating the result count, etc...) start to give the user a 'tactile' feeling of the result set being narrowed. Different behaviours on the 1st and 3rd letters being typed would also make the experience feel very disjointed.

[dobey (dobey)]

OK, I'll let that pass, but it doesn't resolve the other issues. :)

[Rodrigo Moya (rodrigo-moya)]

Fix available in ubuntuone-client-1.3.5

[Joshua Hoover (joshuahoover)]

Letters are highlighted as expected in ubuntuone-client 1.3.5-0ubuntu1.