Hi,

this is a really urgent appeal to Richard: I'm afraid that many of the
quirks of FindWiz's user interface were probably fine a few years ago
when Palm devices had 8 MB RAM and a 32 MB SD card was something to be
proud of.

HOWEVER, nowadays some things really, really ought to be changed:

FindWiz ought to have an effective way to narrow down searches.

[...or have I once again overlooked something which makes everything
very easy and very fast? Here's a report on my first serious search
attempts last night; if I simply went about things completely the
wrong way, will someone please tell me??!!!]


To show what I mean I'll give you some results of the fiddling around
I did last night - on my Centro with presently 9 MB free, with a 4 GB
card with 150 MB free.

I use Fontsmoother with a rather small font (Trebuchet 12), but even
so just the databases in RAM occupy 25 screens in the menu at the
bottom left of the screen, and the databases on the card (which it
takes FindWiz nearly SIX minutes to scan) occupy more than TWO HUNDRED
screens.

With such a mass of files, it is simply not practical to assume that
by default the user will want to search through everything, and that
he/she will occasionally want to deactivate some folders.

I took the trouble to scroll, and scroll, and scroll,... to disable at
least the four backups on my card, but there are massive batches of
files I CAN'T disable:

For some years now I've subscribed to a software suite that gives me
all the relevant information about the German football (aka soccer)
scene; this software produces masses (thousands every year) of tiny
text files organized into hundreds of folders for each season.

Unfortunately they are searched BEFORE the text files in one of only
SEVEN folders on the card that I'll ever WANT to search. So, I'll
either have to disable .txt searching, or be prepared to wait for a
looooong time!

This morning I did a test run, having FindWiz search for a rarely used
German word which I knew I had used somewhere.

I let the search process run for an hour, then stopped it: it had
found six occurrences of the word in 320,000 records, and was still
far from finished.

Except for searching for something really important which can't be
found in any other way, this appears to be highly impractical.



Kind Regards,

Jochen