Saved searches in left sidebar

Sidebar becomes slightly less "dead" when using multiple accounts, but there's still more than enough room (and most users will only have the one account anyways) ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

That might be nice for implementing a "recents" area for your searches to show the last 5-6 or so searches, but we've got dead space to the left already- why create another area to take up space before using what we've already got ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

"Recent searches" are already present in the search drop-down. This idea is to provide a single-click interface to saved searches, i.e. persistent ones that require more UI interaction - the delete option that I haven't sketched and possibly an edit too.

Finally, I can't think how saved searches would usefully be presented in the sidebar..? Saved searches are usually saved by a recognisable name or the search term itself, which requires horizontal UI estate in Western languages. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Agreed, at first I thought it didn't even support Trends. I found that menu purely on accident. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

This happens to me as well! ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

I'm sticking as many thumbs as I have up at this. This looks perfect! ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

That's actually a really good idea for the design. I'd be quite happy with that, even with the additional mouse click (since each search wouldn't be on the sidebar on its own) ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Ooh nice - I like that!

(Clearly you have more spare time than me too ;-) ) ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

That's a great mockup. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Just approve this screenshot and mark the ticket as "The company is working on this idea" and I'll go to buy Tweetie ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

LOVE this. exactly what i'd like to see. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

This layout could work for grouping people too, instead of taking over the sidebar. Nice work! ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

That's a great mockup! Looks like it belongs in the app already (hint hint). ( = ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Looks like they implemented your mockup. Nice work! ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Too bad it's exactly NOT what this feature request was for... Sidebar, we wanted it in the sidebar! ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

The addition to saving searches in 1.1.1 is a step in the right direction, but there should also be some sort of notification on when there is a new tweet matching the saved search criteria. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

OK, as to my previous comment. It does give a notification I see now, but I swear that was not the case earlier. Since my previous comment, I added a few more saved searches and now I see a blue dot next to the search icon indicating that there is a new tweet(s) in one of the saved searches. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Nice but not so useful, i still think that a saved serarch could take place in the sidebar. Imagine you are doing research and have one or two major things you are monitoring. Then you don't want to go to the search tab every time someone of your many saved searches generates a blue dot at the magnifyingglas. Off course it is nice to have the searches saved as you solved it now, and would like to have it. Will not stop looking for a good client with this feature. Nambu has this, but behaves strange an eating "Twitter credits" and don't look so good. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

I'm really glad the solution was added exactly like the mock-up and NOT in the sidebar. Go and read some of the design discussion on the atebits blog for reasons why (specifically regarding the iPhone toolbar buttons) http://blog.atebits.com/

No offence to any of the contributors here, but I don't think anyone has mocked-up (or described) a good solution for saved searches in the sidebar - I believe it would be unusable due to the width. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Mike Hatfield! I have posted a comment, further down, so that you can see what i meant. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Bull, this isn't the iPhone, we aren't constrained to 320 pixels. There were over a dozen suggestions for how this could be placed in the sidebar, and frankly all of them were good possibilities.

The fewer clicks the better, that is the mantra of user interface design. How usable would Safari's tabs be if we had to go to a separate page every time we wanted to switch? (Yes, I know that's what Safari Mobile does, but again this isn't the iPhone).

With this layout I have no way of knowing which of my searches has updated. Considering that I'd like to be monitoring close to a dozen, that is not useful in the slightest. The only notice I get is one dot for all searches. I have no way of telling if that one dot relates to the searches I need for my work, or if it's one of the minor conversations that I have no reason to follow closely. By being constrained to one icon for all fields I am wasting time.

Stop applying iPhone design rules to the desktop.

I thought when I saw this forum that it meant Atebits was actually interested in customer feedback, I bought the program with the assumption that my main issues with it would be corrected. THIS is the largest of those issues. Currently searching is completely useless for me, and judging from other comments in this thread I am not alone. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Great solution! Love it!! :P ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

I *know* it's not the iPhone - that was an example of a design discussion. Good design applies no matter what the target device.

I strongly disagree with the mantra of UI design being "the fewer clicks the better". Following that rule leads to over-cluttered interfaces instead of Use Case-led solutions. A UI isn't usable if your users are constantly hunting for the correct single-click to their goal. Extreme example: http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Sc...

Atebits has responded incredibly well to user feedback on this site. Look how many updates there are in the v1.1 release after only a couple of weeks! However that doesn't mean that the core design should be compromised to placate a few vocal users. If you have such an insurmountable issue with a product that *one* extra click makes it completely useless, then I suggest you're never going to be happy. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

You says a "few vocal users". I accept that, yes, I am more vocal about this then anyone else in this thread, but clearly I am not the only one who thought that this was a need. When I first launched Tweetie I saw this huge empty sidebar and immediately made an intuitive leap that I could put things there. It is a UI design that Apple has conditioned us to expect now in the OS. If there is a sidebar in an app, you can drag things to it. The very first thing I did in Tweetie was tried to drag one of my favorite tweeters into the sidebar. I tried to do this several ways, and then tried to find a menu item to do it as well. Looking at this page it's pretty obvious that I'm not the only one who expected this functionality, and if this many people actually found this site and took the time to register to indicate their expectation of that, just consider how many more Tweetie users there are who didn't.

This isn't an issue of one extra click, it is an issue of a break in workflow. Currently I keep Tweetie open at all times on my left monitor and do my work on the right. Thanks to mouse-wheel drop-through I almost never have to actually bring Tweetie to the foreground, i can read my main feed without having to switch apps. Yesterday I had two saved searches, one that I didn't care about but was curious to watch, and another that I cared a lot about. The former was much more active then the latter, so the activity bubble on the search tab was constantly popping up. Every time I would have to switch apps and click on that tab just to see which feed was updated. Nine times out of ten, it was the one I didn't care about. Now I wanted to save that search so I could read it later, but I didn't care about its updates. If I could have pulled the second search out onto the sidebar I wouldn't have been nearly as interrupted.

Let me ask you this, Mike. Why are you so opposed to giving users the option to do this? Nobody is suggesting that ALL saved searches be put in the sidebar. In several places I've mentioned the desire to DRAG things into the sidebar. If you don't want to use it, you don't have to. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

I hadn't seen your suggestion that this was on a drag-and-drop basis only (it was the last sentence of one of your comments). To which I can concede that could be useful.

By the way, just tried this and it works: Create a new Twitter user* (no followers, locked updates, etc.) and add them to Tweetie. Give them the saved search and you'll get a blue dot on that user when new search results are found.

Mike

* You can use the Gmail "+" trick to re-use an email address on a new account, e.g. Jarvis.Badgley+search1@gmail.com or whatever. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

I tend to think that having saved searches in the sidebar, similar to how it is done in nambu, would kind of gum up the sexy tweetie interface. It's already so nicely layed out with the icons in the sidebar, that adding text links would nasty it up. just my 2 cents. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Jonathan: How would you show the list of saved searches though, especially long-named ones? I don't think widening the sidebar is such a great idea. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Both good points. However burying them in a second level screen means they're going to be forgotten by the user a lot.

I think there are ways to put them in the sidebar and not spoil the look or feel. At the very least - I don't think putting them in the sidebar should be discounted. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

I agree that the persistent searches should be easily reachable and not buried in menus, but that putting them on the left sidebar would make the interface a bit cluttered. I guess we'll have to leave it up to the designer to think of an innovative way to display saved searches quickly. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Perhaps provide the user with the option of a number of pre-designed icons for each search term in the sidebar, similar to the way Google Maps/Earth handles pins? They might nbot fit the search perfectly, but as long as they are recognizable by the user at a glance that shouldn't matter. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

I like SirCrumpet's point the best, and it was what I immediately thought of as well. You could expand on that by making the icons a basic mask and letting the user choose a color to apply onto it.

Also, displaying a name isn't too big of an issue. Use a small font, and only include the first 7 or 8 characters. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

(Window menu/Open in New Window). they clutter up what would be a nice simple UI though. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

The problem is that they don't persist through close. I'm constantly closing and re-opening my twitter client when I move from home/work and setting up my search windows each time will quickly become tiresome. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Why would I want to close tweetie? HOW WOULD I KNOW WHAT"S HAPPENING IN THE WORLD?

;-)

But yeah - get your point. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

On the iPhone - you go to the search and tap the star again, it will ask you if you want to delete the search. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

That would be perfectly fine with me. I know some people think "OMG text in the sidebar makes it ugly and terrible" but I don't see the problem with it. You know exactly what you're clicking on before you click it ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Exactly, a search is not dependent upon which account you perform it from, it doesn't even need an account name. I like how you put them at the bottom of the window, that's a clear delineation from the other tabs (tho I don't think you need that big spyglass icon).

Personally I would rather have my saved searches be visible all the time so I can see when new posts are on each one no matter what tab I'm in. It should probably be an option. The only place I see possible issues here is when the user runs out of room in the sidebar for more searches, but in that case you just do what Safari does and put the overflow into a popup.

I like the idea that clearing the search field removes the whole tab, but I think that the search should only go into the sidebar if the user chooses to put it there (either by dragging, or via a button next to the search field). ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

The search terms could even show and hide like the account actions do so they don't take up space when you aren't in search mode. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

@Sean Yes, that's the idea, showing the searches only if the search tab is active. The Search icon would be marked with the blue NEW dot regardless. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

tho... searches *might* be account specific (think: protected accounts. I'm not sure how the API handles this when logged-in. Web-based searches ignore protected accounts...) ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Forgot to put in the blue dot in my mockup. There should be a dot for the saved searches that have new content.
/olle ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )