Another feature request: Avoid creeping featurism!

In two respects:

1. The GUI
I just upgraded to a recent version of Limewire (4.x), and was shocked to see how cluttered the GUI has become in the meantime!

Category search and result filtering is great, but it definitely messed up the user interface: more and more small windows growing into each other, some even being overlayed multiple times ("< Back to search...", several different systems of tabs in the left panel). Remember ease-of-use, please, and think of Google: One text field that will let you filter search results often does the whole trick -- the Mozilla UI is a great example.

2. Functionality
Keep Limewire a P2P filesharing app.

Please don't try to compete with chat-clients, interfaces for eBay auctions, tag editors, music library managers, pdf/zip/iso/rpm viewers and media players all at the same time. There ARE a number of good specialist apps for all these tasks already.

Make it search and download quickly and robustly, and keep it lean and mean!

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html...featurism.html

Keep up the good work!
Erich

Many people consider the filtering of results to be a good improvement, making their lives easier. If you are not fond of it, you can turn it off via the View menu, under Show/Hide -> Search -> Filter Results.

One of the goals for 4.2 is to streamline the GUI.

He specifically stated that he liked the idea of filters, did you read the post?
He simply offered that there might be a better way to implement the feature, and I agree 100%. But then you've got some strange affinity for keeping things the way they are instead of making them better. The first rendition is rarely the best.
Instead of a series of list item boxes with choices, allow a single text entry field.

Instead of selecting "AVI" from a list, just type ".avi" in to the text field. Want to find all MP3s between 3 minutes and 3m30s, type: ".mp3 3m0s-3m30s" in the text field. This would also allow for negative filtering, and filtering based on filename and annotations. "-.wav" would remove all WAV files from view.

This eliminates the need for about 85% of the screen that is taken up by the current filter selection mechanism.

Hi Gerard,

Thanks for your comments. Our affinity for keeping things the way they are is based on the fact that we have received numerous positive responses with the way things are, and relatively few negative responses. Normally, negative remarks will always outweigh positive ones, because it is generally human nature to complain louder than praise.

You're correct that the first rendition is rarely the best, that's why this is the second rendition of the filters. The first one was poor and most people considered it ugly.

A text input for filtering is a good idea, and we'll keep that in mind as we improve the search result interface. It's not slotted as something for 4.2, but it will ultimately be added.

Thanks.